Very large part of the following article originally appeared as a section of my review of Sennheiser’s flagships IE900. We decided to spin it off as a separate piece to give it the just independence, considering how sensible the topic is.

Introduction to counterfeits and fakes

According to Cambridge dictionary:

Counterfeiting :- noun. UK  /ˈkaʊntəˌfɪtɪŋ / – The activity of making illegal copies of things such as bank notes, DVDs, or official documents.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/it/dizionario/inglese/counterfeiting

… and, let me modestly add, “any other element of registered intellectual property” (e.g. patented goods).

It goes by itself that counterfeiting is a crime defined and punished by the penal code of pretty much all modern countries. Selling products of known counterfeited nature is, of course, consequently also a crime.

This is not unimportant to know, as when one realises to have been sold a counterfeited unit, she/he can leverage on the much higher power of criminal law to pursue the recovery of her/his interests vs the offending seller – with much higher chances of a positive outcome, of course, when such fraudulent seller is identifiable and locatable, and subject to the laws of the same country as the buyer.

Beware of counterfeiting!

The market is literally flooded with fake / counterfeited IE900, and IE600, and many other Sennheiser sets – and not since yesterday.

Sadly the criminals involved with this are quite skilled on delivering aesthetically near-identical products (from the boxing down to the actual items), thus posing a serious threat to the casual user when it comes to choosing and giving trust to their vendors, especially considering the important price tags we are talking about.

Sennheiser recommends to buy new units exclusively from fully trusted, official Sennheiser distributors – and that’s a no brainer.

For second hand units – while of course remembering that channels like ebay or similar need to be taken with two (always better than one) grains of salt – a good idea is to have the seller send a picture with the unit serial number in advance, and get in contact with Sennheiser Consumer Hearing support services: they will check if the serial number is reported as legit.

An illustrative example

I happen to have access to a fake IE900 sample, which I could therefore compare with a guaranteed-genuine one coming directly from Sennheiser’s headquarters.

Sound quality wise I must say I expected a much bigger difference between the two sets. What surprised me the most was in particular the fake unit’s remarkable bilateral extension, reasonably similar to the original one. In terms of bass definition, note body and microdynamics, however, genuine IE900 are quite evidently better.

Visual counterfeiting on the fake unit is really staggering for how realistic it is, and how much attention and careful observation was required to discover the clues indicating the two units did not come from the same ultimate source. I took a few pictures, and shared them with Sennheiser personnel to have confirmation of my findings, and here is my report – with the hope that it may be useful to someone to avoid being frauded.

First and foremost, there was no way to spot any difference whatsoever about the printed carton box sleeve, not on the box’s internal structure and elements, the paddings etc. All apparently identical.

By closely assessing product details however some differences started to come up.

1) Cables’ earhook sheaths are not freely reshapeable on the fake unit I checked – they stay much firmer on their pristine curvature for how much you try to model them. Genuine Sennheiser sheaths are pliable almost like plasteline, and they stay in your wanted shape quite reliably while you wear them.

2) Cables’ chin sliders feature a Sennheiser logo sticker. The genuine one carries an S-logo hologram, the counterfeit one is very obvious flattened, non-holographic, clumsy imitation. Genuine cable is sitting on top in the following picture.

3) Genuine cable’s main sheath features a smooth, uniform, solid external finish. This fake unit’s sheath carries some sort of twisted wires appearance. You can appreciate this difference, too, from the picture above – where, again, the counterfeit cable is the coiled one, below the genuine one.

4) Assessing nozzle ends, genuine IE900 should look “pitch black”, while this counterfeit sample reveals silver colour inside through a wider mesh structure, as shown by this picture.

5) The pinned plastic plate carrying stock tips should show glossy S M L size letters, not matte ones. Furthermore, genuine foam tips have quite flat tops, not bulging ones. Based on this information, try yourself to spot the genuine set in the following picture .

YMMV

It’s of course worth noting that I could assess just one fake unit, so there is no certainty, let alone guarantee, that the above hints do apply to other cases. So don’t take the above clues are indicative, let alone exhaustive, as a “check list” to apply to a suspect IE900 sample.

This article will have done its own right if I succeeded in just making you aware that there is an issue with this, and a serious one too – and you better spend a lot of time and attention to avoid being scammed. Good luck!

The post Beware of Sennheiser IEM Counterfeits and Fakes! appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Gear of the Year: audioreviews.org is soon completing its 5th year. We are still six dedicated and competent authors located all over the western hemisphere, catering to a mature, discerning readership. Our list of earphone reviews is approaching 450 and our Wall of Excellence (WoE) is better decorated than the Christmas tree at NYC’s Rockefeller Center. Since any product on our WoE is backed by more than one opinion, it should give you confidence in your buying decisions.

However, our WoE is not a bunch of “best of” lists as we have not tested all competitors in each category. Such claims would be presumptuous.

We did, sadly, lose our single sponsor HifiGo (and some more suppliers) over our reviews of their gear. But hey, our critical, realistic approach sets us apart from 98% of the blogosphere (we think). We rather deal with companies that have confidence in their products.

Whatever gear passes our test must be somewhat good. We still don’t do Google ads, affiliate links, and we don’t allow trackers…we are no salespeople, we honour your reading pleasure and your privacy. We are simply audio aficionados.

Thank you for your patronage in 2023! Enjoy this read and we wish you a happy and successful 2024!

Hey, feel free to let us know your personal favourites of 2023 in the comments section below.

We thank our 2023 Partners

And here we go…that’s what we enjoyed in 2023…published by author in the order of submission…and purely subjective.

Loomis Johnson…Chicago, USA

Wiim Mini AirPlay 2 Wifi Streamer—the onboard DAC is just fair, and the app is quirky (if very ambitious), but through its digital out this is a genuinely excellent streamer  for less than a hundo.

BGVP DM9 IEM—energetic and massive sounding, these are head and shoulders above any other IEM I’ve heard this year. Richly priced at $600 and worth every penny.

Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Headphones—Bose has marginally better ANC and Sennheiser a longer battery and better UI, but overall the XM5 would be my pick if (god forbid) I could own only one TWS.

Oladance Wearable Stereo Open Ear Headphones —eons better than any bone-conduction model out there, these come close to good in-ear TWS models for sound quality, with a rich warm sound and a big 3D stage. Hall of Fame material.

SMSL D0400  DAC/Headphone Amp—a tad more detailed (if not necessarily better-sounding) than the godlike SU-9, the inclusion of balanced out and an excellent onboard headphone amp makes this my pick among SMSL’s myriad offerings.

Truthear Shio DAC/Dongle—well featured, balanced dongle won’t make your counterfeit Beats sound like Carnegie Hall, but it sounds just slightly more transparent than its ubiquitous price peers.

JBL Boombox 3 Portable Bluetooth Speaker— rather than spending ten grand to mod the sound system on his 100k pontoon boat, a very wealthy friend of mine dropped $349 on one of these. He couldn’t be happier. Link two together and you’ll be in hip-hop heaven.

Eagle Rare 10-Year Bourbon—if this was an IEM, we’d deem it “musical, balanced and fully coherent.” People are asking stupid prices for this in the secondary market, but if you can find it anywhere near its $40 SRP, buy it.

Dreamcloud Premier Rest Hybrid Mattress—the downside of buying a really good mattress is that it’ll sap your ambition faster than a meth habit. If, however, like me your ambition is to lay around and watch professional basketball, this is a necessary acquisition.

Jürgen Kraus…Calgary, CANADA

Short and sweet, as I am mainly still using my 2022 gear. And the best gear is the gear one uses after all. 2023 added a few excellent products to my daily listening. Oladance TWS Pro wearables were most impressive…and useful…a home theatre on your ears you don’t even feel. I can listen to these all day.

In terms of earphones, the Sennheiser IE 900 impressed me most because of their natural, cohesive presentation, their incredible treble quality, and their wonderful dosage across the frequency spectrum. I preferred them much more over the IE 600, which offer the same Harman type tuning we have experienced so often before. Both were sadly loaners. I also love the well-balanced Sennheiser IE 200, which are tuning wise closer to the IE 900 than to the IE 600.

Also very natural sounding are the Akoustyx S6, but they do need some modding to tame the upper midrange. As to budget TWS, I do have a pair of Moondrop Space Travel by my bedside, for talk radio and classical music. They have a very composed and nuanced presentation…and they fit me well.

Also by my bedside is the EarMan CH-Amp/Tradutto combination for driving my HD 600 and final Sonorous III. I equipped the HD 600 with a Hart Audio 4.4 mm balanced cable. Also great is the SMSL DO200 MKII DAC, which I use on my desk.

As a movable desktop stack (between sofa and kitchen table) serves the very good sounding Moondrop DiscDream CD player. A great idea to reconsider this technology — looking forward to another premium Walkman.

An honorouble mention goes to the very versatile TempoTec Serenade X Digital Desktop Player, and TempoTec as a company, as they don’t get lost in countless models of the same…no they offer one model of each product, and each is well thought out. A big step up for them in the last two years.

As a guilty pleasure, I indulged myself with USB cables for audio usage from AudioQuest (Forest), IKEA, and Monoprice. I love USB cables. And this combination of brands doesn’t leave room for the usual shitstorm by naysayers.

And hey, Loomis, we just acquired an Endy mattress. Made in Canada, of course.

Alberto Pittaluga…Bologna, ITALY

Given I’m not one of those world-famous tiktokers I guess it’s preliminary worth remembering that I have a sharp inclination to carefully avoid wasting time on even assessing “stuff” which doesn’t apriori seem to qualify for a serious upgrade to whatever I already own – an attitude of mine that applies across the board of course, not certainly to audio gear only. Such information is I presume key to better understand the following list.

Proceeding by categories, and starting with cans, towards the end of the year I got a pair of Sennheiser HD800. These were quite a lot anticipated to upgrade my pleasure on my particular library vs the HD600 – and that’s of course what happened. As a side bonus I had yet another chance to touch how important fresh pads and a decent cable are for sound optimisation, let alone how tough still is finding an overall more exquisite timbre then the one coming off my Groove.

Shrinking size down to IEMs, my trip to Munich earlier this year got me very curious about Sennheiser’s relatively recent IEM introductions, and that’s where the curiosity to assess IE900 and (from a different source) IE600 came up from.

The latter impressed me almost as much as the former, however when it comes to stunning V-shaped IEM encounters happened this year nothing beats – and I reckon will hardly beat tomorrow – Intime Sho DD.

The other major IEM acquisition of the year is represented by final B3, and their ability to capture the auditioner and port him onto the jazz stage. Honorable mention goes to Akoustykx S6 (and their “magic” Earlocks).

In terms of source gear, I completed my collection of DAPs by acquiring a Sony WM-1A, of course instantly flashing MrWalkman WM1Z signature onto it. For a number of reasons its sonic features are at the same time in line and complementary to those of my other standards: Questyle QP1R and QP2R.

Sometimes it does bring an audible improvement, other times it doesn’t – it depends on the apriori situation of the system you plug it onto. I’m talking about AudioQuest’s Jitterbug. My (quite articulated) home setup is clearly in the benefitted category, and that’s why 3 of these are now stable part of it.

Source gear honorable mention goes to a tiny-budgeted device, Ifi GO Link. That, and IEMs with a balanced cable and a 3.5mm TRRS adapter, right away became my blind buy rec to those individuals which every now and then, attracted by the gear they often see me fiddling with, ask me to indicate “something nice and inexpensive to get started with”.

Looking in retrospect what I just recapped (and I genuinely did it “live”, now, for the mere sake of putting these notes together) none of my 2023 preferred tech comes from chifi-land. The white-bearded badly-aging old continent nerd in me shily shruddered in realising it

Durwood…Chicago, USA

Kefine Klanar

Redefines what a planar can do, the Timeless 7Hz was great but it also had that overblown upper air treble that made it standout. The Klanar on the other hand dials everything down delivering similar quality bass and while not as treble exciting is better balanced, target curve crowd pleasing retaining the technical precision and quick transient delivery of the planar driver.

Moondrop Blessing Dusk 2 

Fits snugly staying in place, great technical details, with enough bass to keep me interested.

BGVP DM9

While I do not own many top tier earphones, I have listened to plenty at shows and know that they best anything I have in the $300 realm. The bass hump is well controlled and balanced nicely in the midbass/sub-bass transition region. The elevated treble plateau keeps them energized and engaging delivering maximum resolution and clarity.

SMSL DO400 DAC/AMP

Extreme value premium desktop DAC melding a powerful headphone amp. I miss the quick control of a potentiometer volume knob of a split dac/amp solution, but it is worth the feature rich resolving DAC and potent headphone amp drive.

Truthear SHIO DAC

Just as powerful as any of the dongles out there it sounds the most blended qualities of a dongle dac without leaning too warm, bassy, thin or sharp. Not head and shoulders above the LG G8, but can turn any USB-C phone into an excellent DAP for an average price.

Oladance OWS Sport

A new category of open-ear sports headphones that offers other uses while avoiding disadvantages of in-ear pressure, ear canal phobias, and isolation, earbud compromises, and over ears isolation and sweatiness. Balanced sound quality that trades low-end bass for open awareness without the lackluster bone conduction competition. Review coming soon, they know what they are doing.

TWS????

Still looking for a TWS all-rounder. I want them to fit tight without loosening slowly, excellent tonality and have good ANC. A blend of the Sony WF-1000XM3 ANC with the sound of the Moondrop Alice combined with the fitment of the KZ ZXS Pro.

When browsing the local classifieds this year I scored some very excellent sounding vintage ADS L570/2 and lesser known local midwest unicorn relic well tuned, amazing imaging cherry veneer Amrita Elan (I think) that my buddy is still scorning me over not “allowing” him to buy them instead- no worries we are still friends. He would love to get his hands on the 3 way model with isobaric woofers anyway.

Kazi Mahbub Mutakabbir…Munich, GERMANY

This year passed by in the blink of an eye, but fortunately I managed to listen to hundreds of devices in this rather short span. My personal collection also went through some radical changes, so without further ado…

Firstly, I finally upgraded my reference gear, both portable and desktop. On the portable side, it’s now Lotoo PAW Gold Touch paired with the venerable Cayin C9. The desktop, meanwhile, is the recently-retired Questyle CMA Twelve Master. Having tried numerous TOTL setups so far, these two fit my needs the most. I may add a tube amp down the line, but that’s for the future.

On the IEM side of things, my daily drivers include Sennheiser IE 900 and the (discontinued) Softears Turii. The IE 900 are perhaps the most advanced in terms of driver tech, and the Turii have such a unique, spacious sound that it belies the single dynamic setup. They have received the most “ear time” this year, and will likely continue to do so in the coming year.

On the TWS side of things, I am impressed by the Beats Studio Buds Plus. For once, a Beats product is actually decent enough to be a daily driver. Apart from the middling noise cancellation, there is little I’d change about them given the price tag.

Finally, I have streamlined my headphones collection and ended up purchasing a modded Sennheiser HD 800. These hold up tremendously well against the planar magnetic behemoths even now, and the staging and imaging are unparalleled in the sub-$2000 space. I was also pleasantly surprised by Sennheiser HD 660S2, though the price tag is a bit higher than I’d prefer.

This year, I finally managed to audition the Sennheiser HE-1 for almost an hour. It was a surreal experience and I can definitely see (or hear) why these are so mythical. That being said, the Warwick Acoustics Aperio are no slouch either and trade blows with the supreme Sennheisers.

But the one pair of headphones that I can call my “personal endgame” are none other than Warwick Bravura. They get dangerously close to the summit-fi behemoths and fortunately, come pre-built as a system so you can save on the cost of an energizer or accompanying pre-amps to further flavor the sound.

Notable mentions: Campfire Audio Supermoon (perhaps the best sounding planar IEMs), Softears Twilight (fantastic single DD), Effect Audio Code 23 (the best copper cable I have ever tried, despite the challenging ergonomics), iFi Go Blu (fantastic little dongle), Cayin RU7 (replaced Questyle M15 for my portable use).

Biodegraded…Vancouver, CANADA

Environmentally friendly, as his name implies, he stuck to his 2021 gear…again. Gives us carbon credits.

Gear of the Year 2022

The post Gear Of The Year 2023 – Our Personal Favourites appeared first on Music For The Masses.

The Calgary Community Standards Bylaw 32M2023 protects the industry and offenders but not the community from noise and vibrations, not even from sleep deprivation. Example: air conditioners that are poorly placed AND poorly managed without consideration for the neighbours, a common problem in Calgary. The city does little to promote vibrant, liveable, inner-city neighbourhoods with a high quality of life.

Disclaimer: location images taken from publicly accessible Google Street View and Google Earth Pro. Last edited 2023-08-20.

Introduction

This rather comprehensive article deals with holes in the Calgary Community Standards Bylaw and the consequences for me and many other victims whose quality of life is adversely affected by inconsiderate neighbours. I have been working on this topic since 2008.

Under the Calgary Community Standards Bylaw, residents have the right to not be disturbed by noise and, therefore, have the responsibility to not make noise that disturbs others. Source: Calgary Bylaws site.

In reality, this is not true. The city allows companies to operate 110 dBC leaf blowers indiscriminately during the 48 hour period following a snowfall, nights included.

Air Conditioners have been a similar, long-standing problem. In 2009, Bill Bruce, then the head of Animals and Bylaws Services, reported 1500 annual AC-related noise complaints to me personally. This number must have increased substantially with the increasingly hotter Calgary summers.

Noisy hot tubs are not far behind in negative popularity.

The Calgary bylaws do not consider AC installation locations and the effects of low-frequency noise.

!

Air Conditioners causing Constant Hum and Vibrations – Example from an Established Neighbourhood.

Here a representative sample of an issue that affects many Calgarians: I have lived in the white, semi-attached house with green trimmings (centre right) for 19 years. Structurally, both attached houses are one unit. While we were out of town recently, the neighbours to the left of this double-dwelling installed an air conditioner in the middle of the narrow, reflective sideyard that is partially covered by the two protruding rooflines.

A narrow sideyard ist the worst possible installation site for neighbours as the operators essentially throw their unwanted “garbage” over the property line, but with a twist.

The AC emits sound pressure that is echoing (technical term “reverberating”) between the walls back and forth, is thereby amplified and shoots out of the front and back of the sideyard.

Sound sample recorded with phone at my patio door (2023-10-01 @ 4°C). Would you like to sit on my deck?

But part of the sound pressure is absorbed by the vinyl siding and causes the neighbouring house walls to vibrate. The more rigid the walls, the lesser the vibrations; stucco is the best reflector with the smallest absorption.

The vibrations travel a long way without much attenuation (because of the long wavelengths of low frequencies) and affect all our walls, including the party wall between the attached dwellings.

The science and its consequences are well established and summarized in this document:

Not Cool: Central Air Conditioner Noise in Calgary’s Narrow Sideyards Background and Solutions

Although there are lots of other ACs running in the neighbourhood, including one in the front yard of the attached dwelling, their sound waves do not invade our house as the waves can freely dissipate towards the street. They also do not reach our backyard.

My very problem is not conventional noise but wall vibrations, something omitted by the bylaws.

“…Council will review how to handle complaints about air conditioners, central vacuum systems and even outdoor hot tubs. The concern is the constant hum or vibration is too annoying and doesn’t fall under existing bylaws. Mayor Naheed Nenshi would like to see air conditions only in backyard and not between homes but that would mean changes to land use bylaws…” GLOBAL NEWS 2013.

The Double Nuisance

The AC nuisance is twofold: installation in the “wrong location” and managing its use without consideration for others. Very common in Calgary. In our case…

1. Poor Air Conditioner Placement (between Homes)

Owing to its installation location in the narrow sideyard between homes, the AC’s sound pressure and the resulting wall vibrations generate a constant hum all over our house, from the basement, the basement bedroom, the main floor (kitchen, living room), through my home office to even our master bedroom. And our backyard sounds like a construction site. There is no escape.

It is not loud inside but static, visceral, repetitive, and simply everywhere and continuous over long periods. And when you are stationary (bed, sofa), this becomes a Tinnitus. It is a constant stress for people susceptible to low-frequency noise.

It has to be noted that the hum does NOT come in through our windows but strictly from our own vibrating walls.

You can recreate this hum by using this online tone generator, pull the slider to 120, and push PLAY:

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

120 Hz appears to be the natural resonance frequency of my walls. This is so low in the frequency spectrum that it cannot even be covered up by the TV sound (unless you add a subwoofer)…even earplugs are problematic.

Another example of a low-frequency nuisance is that famous Encana hum that travelled for kilometres.

Now try to sleep when it hums and buzzes around your ears in your pillow at night when ambient noise is low. How can anyone take the liberty to impose themselves on others like that? Well, they can, and it happens all over the city.

Constant low-frequency noise, even at low volumes, is a nuisance for many, particularly at night.

2. Poor Air Conditioner Management (vs. Common Courtesy)

Placing an AC unfavourably for the neighbours is one thing, managing it unfavourably is another.

Calgary has a subarctic (mountain) climate (Dfc according to the Köppen-Geiger climate classification) with cool summer nights (8-16°C). My bedroom is located 1110 m above sea level. Is there ever a need for running an AC in the wee morning hours?

Like many other Calgarians, the owners run their AC in overkill mode: they don’t mitigate the heat problem by keeping the sun out using blinds or opening their windows to let a cool breeze in. And they run it even on cool days.

Relying on a thermostat and/or timer, the AC runs even on 12°C evenings (after a 19°C afternoon peak) for hours and also daily in the middle of the night (independent of outside conditions)…which affects our sleep patterns. No attempt is made to be considerate, to conserve energy, or to protect the environment. And they are by far not the only ones.

If you are lucky, your neighbours acknowledge the impact of their AC and are willing to mitigate the problem. If you are unlucky, they put their heads in the sand. Ours are not even talking to us.

The circular argument is: “installation and use are within current bylaws, hence it cannot affect neighbours”.

Unbelievable that neighbours that far away are allowed to affect one’s life this much.

Blast from the Past

We gathered technical knowledge during a two-season abuse from an AC unit formerly in our sideyard back in 2008/2009, installed by a house flipper.

Although this unit was much closer to our walls and much louder than the currently offensive one on the other side, it did not affect the basement bedroom or my back office. Its more aggressive pitch was filtered out by the walls. Only the familiar 120 Hz wall vibrations remained.

Those neighbours switched their AC off at 11 pm nightly to let us sleep in our master bedroom.

Bylaw Services were of no help, but the AC unit disappeared nevertheless when the flipper wanted to sell the house. Our interaction with potential buyers would have made a sale difficult.

Legal Aspects

The Calgary Community Standards Bylaw 32M2023 states…

No Person shall operate or permit to be operated an air conditioner, fan, central vacuum system or generator that causes a Continuous Sound that exceeds the greater of the following Sound Levels:

1. (a)  70 decibels (dBC) Leq measured during the Day-time; or
2. (b)  60 decibels (dBC) Leq measured during the Night-time;

at any Point of Reception within a Residential Development.

Comment: Air conditioners are rated between 65 dB and 75 dB (manufacturers use A-weightung, not C-weighting, as it does not consider the wall-penetrating low frequencies and produces much smaller numbers). Not having a fixed reference for sound pressure measurements (“at any point of reception”) renders the city’s sound level numbers meaningless.

Essentially all ACs in narrow sideyards would fail these measurements at the property line considering the amplification through ricocheting sound waves. Industry lobby prevents that.

As an educated guess, the neighbours’ AC would clock in at 80-85 dBC at the property line, way above the legal thresholds.

The City of Calgary only considers noise quantity but not noise quality. Even a quietly dripping faucet is excavating over time.

What the Bylaw misses: Installation Sites, Wall Vibrations, Noise Quality, Health Implications

No person should be exposed to a constant hum (or any other CONSTANT MECHANICAL noises of any kind) from neighbours in their own house. If you applied such sounds to a prison cell, you would have Amnesty International after you two days later.

The city only considers noise quantity, but not noise quality (such as pitch, frequency etc.). The current legal quantities are ludicrous, especially since they are not even applied rigorously (“at any point of reception…within a residential development” vs. property line; what is specifically meant with residential development is also unclear).

Also, low-frequency noise is a known health hazard. According to common sense, nobody should be given the right to run their appliances in other people’s houses.

No air conditioners should be allowed to run in narrow, reflective, noise amplifying sideyards…banned, for example, in Vancouver or Denver for that reason.

All these suggestions are common sense. As to common courtesy: it is sadly not governed by bylaws either.

Air conditioners should not be allowed in narrow, reflective, noise-amplifying sideyards.

Air Conditioners and the Calgary Climate Emergency

Air conditioners are both cause and result of climate change. They run on a coal-/natural gas-powered grid and release further CO2 through their refrigerant. Air conditioners first appeared in substantial numbers in Calgary after nine 30°C days in 2003. Their number has grown exponentially in recent years.

In November 2021, Calgary has declared a climate emergency and calls for action:

Pure greenwashing with empty words! It is, however, grotesque, that many young people burn the planet out of convenience – and leave it to their offspring to deal with the consequences. Selfish or just thoughtless?

Concluding Remarks

The new Calgary Community Standards Bylaw continues to fail protecting residents from inconsiderate neighbours. It still caters to industry and offenders – and reflects the city’s lack of knowledge of basic physics and health issues related to noise.

Back in 2013, mayor Nenshi already wanted to ban air conditioners from sideyards (Global News reported), but, on the contrary, the city even loosened their land use bylaw in 2018. CBC had raised the issue first back in 2009 [here].

Today, City Council rather focuses on noisy cars – that come and go in an instant while changing their pitch constantly (“Doppler effect”) – and not on stationary mechanical devices that harass people with constant, static low-frequency noise – day and night.

Since Bylaw is typically on the offenders’ side, all that victims have available is civil disobedience within the legal framework…which worked for us in the past.

Calgary is way behind comparable cities when it comes to establishing and preserving liveable, vibrant neighbourhoods. Compare to Vancouver, Seattle, Minneapolis…

In 20 years from now, I’m sure, the installation and use of air conditioners will be strictly regulated owing to the world’s ever evolving climate crisis. Until then, the number of neighbourly feuds will increase with the rising number of unregulated air conditioners.

Until next time…keep on listening!

The post Calgary Community Standards Bylaw 32M2023 Failure: Intrusive Air Conditioners And Problematic Neighbours appeared first on Music For The Masses.

The latest Mac generation features a relatively good audio circuit that makes many budget dongles and headphone amps obsolete.

Introduction

Apple computers, unlike the company’s mobile devices, have traditionally delivered poor audio quality through their 3.5 mm headphone socket. And most Windows machines are not any better.

Plugging an earphone or headphone into my 2012 MacBook Air and listening to iTunes/Apple Music creates a dull and blunt listening experience. This low quality is a contradiction to the capabilities of digital audio, which goes back at least 20 years. Even the 2013 iPhone 5S had stunning audio quality. Similarly, Apple’s “Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Adapter” delivers excellent sound quality.

In order to make computers sound better, digital audio pioneer Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio (and contractor to AudioQuest), invented the dongle DAC back in 2012, the DragonFly Black. A tiny device without its own battery, it drew power from the host. The DragonFly was restricted to use with a computer as it drew more than 100 mA, too much for iPhone to handle.

As of 2016, the next version of the “Black” was within the iPhone’s current draw tolerance. Many companies jumped on the bandwagon flooding the market with such devices. But not all dongles are equal and ALL of them are a compromise. Such that draw little current (and therefore drain your phone company slowly) have limited power, and the powerful ones empty your phone’s battery fast.

When it comes to dongle-DAC use with computers, current drain is largely irrelevant considering that desktop machines don’t have a battery at all, and notebooks have high battery capacities compared to a phone. Power is therefore no problem with computer application, sound quality has foremost priority.

Dongle DACs typically have 1 to 2 V, depending on impedance. Some, such as the Helm Bolt, automatically switch voltage depending on detected headphone impedance.

Apple introduced a new integrated audio circuit in their latest models:

• MacBook Air introduced in 2022
• MacBook Pro introduced in 2021 or later
• Mac mini introduced in 2023
• Mac Studio introduced in 2022

These models contain an audio circuit that is power wise very similar to dongles such as the Helm Bolt, ifi Audio GO Link, DragonFly Red and Cobalt. Below 150 ohm headphone impedance, the circuit provides a voltage of 1.25 V RMS, above 150 ohm and up to 1000 ohm, the headphone jack delivers 3 V RMS. You find Apple’s respective support article here.

Apple’s integrated DAC supports sample rates up to 96 kHz (just like the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt).

I calculated the resulting power and current drain as displayed in the following table:

What we have learnt so far is that Apple’s new audio circuit is as powerful as a standard dongle DAC of the kind that also works with a phone. Yes, there are more powerful dongles on the market such as the Apogee Groove, Questyle M15, or ifi Audio Go bar, which will work better with insensitive headphones.

The 2022 MacBook Air with the M2 processor has its headphone jack on the right-hand side.

Amplification and Sound Quality

Playing in-ears with 32 ohm impedance is a piece of cake, even the 70 ohm Sennheiser HD 25 headphones (on the title photo) get lots of volume. Just like many “standard dongle DACs”, the 300 ohm Sennheiser HD 600 brings the Mac audio to its limits. Yes, it principally works, but it lacks pizazz.

The current-hungry Final E5000 iems are a special case in that they do not run well with most current-conserving dongle DACs and daps, for example the ifi Go link, Helm Bolt or TempoTec V6. They play loud enough but lack bass control, an indication that hey don’t receive enough current.

My testing confirms the tech data comparison with comparable dongles.

And here comes the surprise: the sound quality of Apple’s new audio quality is…astonishingly good for what it is: crisp, transparent, clear. Very surprising. It sounds very similar (in terms of quality) to the ifi Go link or Helm Bolt.

Concluding Remarks

Apple’s new adaptive audio circuit finally sounds quite decent. Poor audio circuits in computers were the reason for the invention of the dongle DAC. The idea was to keep it small, down to the size of a thumb drive.

Some basic $50-100 dongle DACs have now become obsolete for modern Macs, which makes these devices even more compact. Where Apple are exaggerating is with the compatibility with high-impedance headphones. It principally works, but you are better off with a dedicated, powerful, headphone DAC/amp such as the ifi GO bar or the Questyle M15 on the go.

Testing this is easy: if you have a new Mac, try it out. If you don’t have one, don’t bother as you won’t buy one for this purpose anyway.

Until next time…keep on listening!

Contact us!

Disclaimer

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Using Headphones With Your New Mac [Without An External DAC/Amp] – A Review appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Introduction

One of my most “interesting” discoveries for me has been that a high end, high efficiency IT system (e.g. an hi-tier Laptop) can be quite far from being an ideal platform for an apparently “light” data transfer activity such as streaming digital audio from where its passive containers (the FLAC or WAV files) are, up to a USB-connected DAC.

The first and simplest perplexity an IT enthusiast, or specialist, comes up with when confronted with the above statement is some variation of:

“Cmon… A bit is a bit! The PC just has to transfer a digital file to a digital device, via a digital interface. Don’t tell me you ‘hear’ deterioration in the process as there can’t obviously be – data will not deteriorate!”.

Of course it’s exactly like that.

A bit is a bit, and the very same bits stored into (say) a FLAC file onto the PC’s hard disk will reach the externally connected USB DAC once sent over. No doubt. No error.

Too bad that this is not the point.

Cables as trojan horses

DACs are devices supposed to take such digital data (FLAC or whatever files) and convert their contents “on the fly” (i.e., while still receiving them, one little chunk at a time) into analog data (i.e. the music we all want to enjoy).

So far so logic. The problem is that a few unobvious caveats apply.

First of all it’s important to understand that while EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) and RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) investing, say, a laser printer while printing a Word page on paper is not going to significantly (or at all) change the quality of a 600 dpi printed text, DAC chips and the rest of the circuitry around them will change (and significantly so) their behaviour, and ultimately reproduce “different sounding music”, when subject to EM/RF (and other) perturbance.

And no, it’s not enough to protect (“shield”) the DAC against perturbances in the human audible frequency ranges (20-20.000 Herz give or take) because this all is not about preserving the DAC’s job result after it was obtained, rather it’s about making sure the DAC is not “disturbed while doing its job” (simplistically said).

The bad news is in facts that DAC chips, and the electronics “around” them inside the box are sensible to frequencies up to a few Giga herz (!), which can sadly come from a virtually infinite spectrum of possible origins.

“Well then this is mostly about properly shielding the physical DAC box, so any possible “waves” polluting the environment near my DAC will not get in, no? Is this why I often read that a desktop device will most often be better than a mobile one?“

Sadly, no.

Or yes, of course you would ideally want a “nicely shielded dac box”. And yes, this is (normally) an inherent advantage desktop systems have over portable ones. That’s quite logical. But not enough.

Seriously pernicious interference can first of all come from the DAC’s power supply itself.

Converting from Alternate Current (supplied by the wall outlet) to Continuous Current (required by the DAC electronics to work) creates in general “side effects”, which are nasty for our DAC, and are transported into it by the very electrical cable which is needed to feed it with the “good part” of its required power.

Ideally, we would want:

1. a “side effect free” Power Transformer, to generate an as apriori-pure CC as possibile, and
2. shielded power transport cables to avoid “collecting noise on the go”.

Furthermore: the USB cable is another trojan horse for noise – and the more so if the same cable is used to carry both data and power into those DACs that do not have a separate input port for an independent power supply.

A PC 99.9% of the times has not been designed with audio-grade EMI/RFI prevention in mind, for the simple reason that it won’t be required by 99.9% of its uses.

All sorts of “bad waves” (I’m again vulgarising here) do happen inside the PC, and do indeed propalate out via any connected electrical conductor – there surely included the USB cable, the same on which our “a bit is a bit is a bit” data is unawarely travelling.

Timing is vital

Should the above (vulgarised) scenario be not enough, there’s even more to take care of. Again, I’ll make this a bit simplistic but give me some rope here, or wordage gets too complicated and it all’d get even worse

Data communication between a PC and another PC, or between a PC and a HD for example, are designed to be “as quick as possible”, while not necessarily “as time-regular as possible”.

While saving your Word file from your PC memory to your HD the actual writing speed might vary during the process as a consequence of many factors (your PC doing something else at the same time, the HD receiving other files at the same time, the HD speed recalibrating following thermal variations, etc etc etc). Depending on what actually happens, your file will save like one tenth of a second faster or slower. Who cares…

In a very bad case a peak of interference will force a data packet retransmission: a full second might be lost in the process (how bad!…). What really matters though is that no quality difference will be there at the end: our file will be “perfectly intact” on the HD.

Not the same applies when the “receipient” is a DAC.

Audio devices require to receive digital data on a perfectly timed schedule. Otherwise (guess what?) the DAC being unable to autonomously correct such schedule, it will convert data at the “irregular” pace with which it receives them, and the result will be “different music” than expected.

Data flow into the DAC must follow a sort of atomic-clock-precision “metronome”.

Now guess what else: when you connect an external DAC to a PC via USB, the default choice is using the PC’s internal “metronome” (called “Clock”), which – you know that by now – is sub-par for our audio purposes as it never was designed with the level of accuracy, and never equipped with those pace-granting gimmicks a DAC desperately needs.

Furtherly, even when the PC and the DAC “somehow manage” to adopt an adequately reliable clock to keep data flow pacing as regularly as the DAC wants, internal PC EMI/RFI can – and will – screw timing up every now and then anyway. And, DAC chips in general don’t come with built-in “circuitry” capable to correct such “hiccups” on the fly.

Lastly: as pacing is so important each DAC has its own independent metronome clock generator inside, used to master the timing of all its internal operations. A similar little device (“oscillator”) than the one used inside the PC generates that, just a more precise (and expensive) one. Too bad that such device is an electrical device like all the rest inside there, so should inbound power supply be not perfectly clean… yes, you guessed it

What a mess. What can we do?

Well very simply put what I just tried to say until now tells us that first and foremost a “generic” IT system (a PC, a Laptop…) is for a number of reasons far from being an ideal choice as an “audio player” when audiophile-grade results are wanted.

To solve the problem there are three possible conceptual approaches

1. Adopt more “audio-adequate” systems as digital players, and/or
2. Adopt “higher tier” audio devices (DACs) equipped with appropriate “noise countering” circuitry, and/or
3. Adopt additional devices, stacked “in between” the digital player and the DAC to “correct issues” on the go

A super-simple example of type-1 approach is using a battery powered device as digital player: it will infacts apriori have less power-originating noise as it will not require a power transformer (although… careful here: batteries are not totally noise-free either… but let’s not overcomplicate the story now).

Always in the type-1 area: stay away from general purpose PCs, even more so if they are beefed-up gaming rigs. Every single chip on the motherboard is a potential (and effective!) source of EMI/RFI and of time-pacing perturbance.

Even on “simpler hw” machines then gaming rigs the more different stuff the operating system is asking the hw to do while sending data out, the worse for our case. Using an appropriate SBC (Single Board Computer) class device driven by a stripped-down OS where only the essential processes to our special case are kept alive is, barred exceptions and caveats, a technically much healtier – if technically steeper – path to follow for best results given the situation.

A DAC offering the possibility to get power from an independent, audio-quality Power Supply instead of sucking it from the host via the same USB cable used for data is then the first and simplest example of type-2 approach.

DACs capable of inverting the default master-slave USB protocol, and play the “host” role themselves while receiving USB data from the host are another. And so on.

And finally, a number of articles will over time appear on our blog covering devices and accessories of various vendors and types implementing “type-3 approach” at various levels. Stay tuned

The post A Bit Is A Bit Is A Bit. Or… Is It? appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Most of us use soap dispensers in our showers such as IKEA Tisken – that are attached by suction cups to the wall tiles. The suction cups tend to stick well to the wall initially, but, after a period of 2-3 years, they appear to pop off for no good reason.

Sticking them on again may work for minutes and even hours, but these little suckers tend to fall off again and again, even without any soap weight on the dispenser. Examining the surface of the suction keeps does not show any evidence of wear. Even touching the sticky surface gives you the impression it has plenty of grip.

One would think that degreasing tiles and suction cup with rubbing alcohol should revitalize the silicon. But it didn’t work. There was initial grip, which disappeared miraculously after a few hours…and the suction cup was off again by itself.

In my frustration, I retired the Tisken and attached the spare. It worked. When comparing the old and brand new cups, I could not record any obvious difference. There was no visible or haptical wear and tear.

Coincidentally, my wife’s Tisken suction cup also fell off. She appeared to have found a fix by cleaning suction cup and tile with 70% rubbing alcohol – to remove grease from both. But that also did not last long. This went on for weeks and we had no clue why.

In the meantime, my new suction cup had also given up. Frustrating.

The only Fix that works: hot Water

All it takes is water close to boiling. Bring water to boil in a kettle, wait a few seconds until the bubbling stops, then immerse the suction cup in this hot water for about a minute. Take it out, shake it (don’t touch the surface of the suction cup, don’t use a towel), then slap it with VIGOR onto the CLEAN bathroom tile. Voila! This worked even for my older Tisken (I had written off).

A variation of this is to rejuvenate the suction cup adding a thin film of silicon grease which is used by scuba divers to seal their rubber equipment. You find it in hardware stores. You could also try vaseline.

But: thin film means thin film. I first had added a much too generous layer, which caused the cup not to stick firmly to the tile at all. Thin works, very thin works better.

Should this still not work (or fix is only intermittent), repeat the jog and let the suction cup dry up without load for a couple of days after reattaching.

Concluding Remarks

Non-sticking suctions cups can be frustrating, but there is no reason to throw them away. Just use hot water and slap them back on firmly. And done!

That was easy in the end!

The post IKEA Tisken And Other Suction Cups Falling Down / Not Sticking – Here’s The Ultimate Fix appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Die meisten von uns benutzen in ihren Duschen Seifenspender wie die IKEA Tisken, die mit Saugnäpfen an den Wandfliesen befestigt werden. Die Saugnäpfe haften anfangs gut an der Wand, aber nach 2-3 Jahren scheinen sie sich ohne Grund zu lösen. 

Ein erneutes Aufpfropfen kann minuten- oder sogar stundenlang funktionieren, aber die kleinen Saugnäpfe fallen immer wieder ab, selbst wenn der Spender nicht mit Seife beschwert ist. Eine Untersuchung der Oberfläche der Saugnäpfe zeigt keine Anzeichen von Abnutzung. Selbst wenn man die klebrige Oberfläche berührt, hat man den Eindruck, dass sie sehr griffig ist.

Man sollte meinen, dass das Entfetten von Fliesen und Saugnapf mit Reinigungsalkohol das Silikon wiederbeleben sollte. Aber das hat nicht funktioniert. Die anfängliche Haftung verschwand auf wundersame Weise nach ein paar Stunden … und der Saugnapf löste sich wieder von selbst.

In meiner Frustration habe ich das Tisken ausgemustert und das Ersatzteil angebracht. Es funktionierte. Beim Vergleich der alten und nagelneuen Näpfe konnte ich keinen offensichtlichen Unterschied feststellen. Es gab keine sichtbaren oder haptischen Abnutzungserscheinungen. 

Zufällig fiel auch der Tisken Saugnapf meiner Frau ab. Sie schien eine Lösung gefunden zu haben, indem sie Saugnapf und Fliese mit 70%igem Reinigungsalkohol entfettete. Aber auch das hielt nicht lange. Und es ging wochenlang so weiter. Wir hatten keine Ahnung, warum.

In der Zwischenzeit hatte auch mein neuer Saugnapf den Geist aufgegeben. Ärgerlich.

Die einzige Lösung, die funktioniert: heißes Wasser

Alles, was Sie dazu brauchen ist Wasser nahe am Siedepunkt. Bringen Sie das Wasser zum Kochen, warten Sie ein paar Sekunden, bis das Blubbern aufhört, und tauchen Sie den Saugnapf dann mindestens eine Minute lang ins heiße Wasser. Nehmen Sie ihn heraus, schütteln Sie ihn (berühren Sie nicht die Oberfläche des Saugnapfes) und klatschen Sie ihn dann mit SCHMACKES auf die SAUBEREN Badezimmerfliesen. Benutzen sie auch kein Handtuch. Voilà! Das hat sogar bei meinem älteren Tisken funktioniert (den ich abgeschrieben hatte). 

Eine Variante davon ist, den Saugnapf zusätzlich mit einer dünnen Schicht Silikonfett zu regenerieren, das von Tauchern zur Versiegelung ihrer Gummiausrüstung verwendet wird. Man findet es in Baumärkten. Vaseline geht auch.

Aber: dünner Film heißt dünner Film. Ich hatte zuerst eine viel zu großzügige Schicht aufgetragen, was dazu führte, dass der Saugnapf überhaupt nicht mehr fest an der Fliese haftete. Dünn geht, sehr dünn geht besser.

Sollte dies immer noch nicht funktionieren (oder die Lösung nur sporadisch sein), wiederholen Sie den Vorgang und lassen Sie den Saugnapf nach dem erneuten Anbringen 1-2 Tage lang ohne Belastung trocknen.

Schlussbemerkung

Nicht haftende Saugnäpfe können frustrierend sein, aber es gibt keinen Grund, sie wegzuwerfen. Verwenden Sie einfach heißes Wasser und klatschen Sie sie wieder fest an. Und fertig!

Das war am Ende doch ganz einfach! Nachher ist man immer schlauer.

The post IKEA Tisken und andere Saugnäpfe halten nicht – hier ist die ultimative Lösung appeared first on Music For The Masses.

The Calgary Arts Academy (CAA) needs to clear >400 m of walkways and sidewalks after every snow flurry for public safety. This is done with the help of noisy and dirty gas-powered leaf blowers – and typically in the middle of the night, for 20-50 mins…resulting in neighbours’ sleep disturbance.

This unreasonable practice is backed by a revised interpretation of the old Calgary Community Standards bylaw – but outlawed elsewhere for obvious reasons. CAA is advised to deploy professional equipment (dedicated snow blowers) as relief to the neighbourhood – and the city should ban dirty 2-stroke gardening tools altogether consistent with their climate emergency declaration.

This page is being continuously updated. Stay tuned.

Introduction

I usually write about sound. Sound is pleasant. But there is also unwanted sound which is referred to as noise. And noise can be harmful to people’s health. The health effect is exacerbated by noise at night, as it disturbs people’s sleep: wakes them up, keeps them up for the time of the noise pollution, and may cause difficulties in falling asleep again. In the long run, it may alter people’s sleep rhythm.

In the short run, nightly sleep disturbance results in headaches, fatigue, irritability, and it affects someone’s professional performance and productivity. Apart from that night noise causes annoyance and displeasure.

Do I make this up? No, it comes from the World Health Organization, reflects my own experience – and simply summarizes common sense.

But noise is not just noise.  There is a certain kind of noise I needed to avoid. Food blenders in the kitchen, hair dryers in the bathroom, a vacuum cleaner whooshing around—all produced an intense whining sound that, given the specific wiring connections between my ears and my brain, kept me from thinking about anything but the sound itself while it was going on. 

If you don’t want to to start your day aggravated and sleep deprived…well…then you better don’t live close to Calgary Arts Academy.

The Issue

The Calgary Arts Academy, located in the established residential community of Calgary Richmond Knobhill, has to service over 200 m of internal walkways and over 200 m of public sidewalk, totalling over 400 m, which includes snow clearing, performed by various contractors over time.

Whilst this has never been an issue since we moved here in 2004, the new contractor elects to clear snow between 3 am and 5 am on weekdays, and at around 7 am on weekends. The company does not exclusively deploy dedicated professional snow clearing equipment (“snow blowers”) but high-revving, 2-stroke leaf blowers which are aggressively noisy (hence banned even at daytime, elsewhere) and extremely dirty.

>400 m of leaf blower! Night after night at times.

It sounds like this and runs from 15 mins to over an hour, depending on snow conditions:

When the above incident happened in May 2022, it sparked the interest of CTV – and they sent a TV team [here’s their video]. Strangely enough, nobody bothers about constant repeats of this in the winter.

Now repeat this nuisance night after night…again and again.

While common sense alone suggests that noise will disturb sleep, either by waking the sleeper or by changing the level of sleep, actual measurement of the problem is not a simple matter (M.J. Epstein, 2020). Buy the book of this UofC researcher here.

Legal Situation vs. Common Sense

Although it sounds counterintuitive, the City of Calgary allows anything that could be considered snow-clearing devices to be deployed day and night within 48 h following a snowfall (though site licences can be revoked on an individual basis).

Leaf blowers were explicitly banned at night a few years ago – and the bylaw’s wording has not changed since.

What has changed is the interpretation of the bylaw text when somebody found a loophole in the wording: an ambiguous text passage is interpreted in favour of the offender – out of fear the city could loose the battle in court. Suddenly the banned leaf blowers were allowed again – out of the blue. A true paradox!

The Arguments Pro and Contra

Some people who are either invested in the snow-clearing business or school safety argue snow clearing has to be done at night AND with leaf blowers. Both these arguments are individually flawed – and even more so in combination. None of these holds up to critical thinking (“logic”).

• Snow has been removed with shovels and dedicated snow blowers up to ca. 2015. Leaf blowers have appeared on a large scale in the winter since ca. 2015 in Calgary. Safety was given before.
• The vast majority of Calgary property owners don’t operate leaf blowers for snow removal. Their sidewalks are also safe.
• In the past, CAA cleared snow after 7 am in order to be considerate.
• CAA has over 450 metres of sidewalks and walkways to service. That’s a task for a dedicated snow blower.
• Dedicated snow blowers are quiet, fast, and effective, they operate with a rotating brush and pile the snow up on by the side of a walkway; leaf blower just superficially blow snow around.
• Publice safety also relates to the school’s neighbours. Sleep-deprived drivers bear a risk to CAA’s students and others.

It is not about safety, it really all about a quick buck. The solution: if company’s scheduling benefits from nightly work, please use quieter tools….like their own snow blowers…on this 400+ m stretch.

Possible Solutions

• Everything stays the same until the city adjusts their bylaw.
• Bylaw Director revokes CAA’s site licence.
• Calgary Arts Academy changes contractor.
• Current contractor changes nightly habits – and also sticks to agreements with school and their public statements.
• CAA purchases a snow blower, or the contractor uses theirs (they do have them).

The simplest solution would be to use a quieter tool such as a snowblower, which does not affect the contractor’s scheduling or jeopardize safety.

Leaf Blowers and the Environment

Apart from emitting noise, leaf blowers are fossil technology and an environmental disaster – they should be banned on that argument alone. This is discussed extensively in the following online article:

Concluding Remarks

In summary, Calgary Arts Academy have started imposing themselves on the neighbourhood through their impervious contractor – and sadly are protected by a botched city bylaw.

The Academy finds it convenient having found a reliable contractor – but holds the ultimate responsibility for the contractor’s impact on the public. They close their eyes whilst hiding behind the “safety for students” argument, which is flawed as safety does not rely on noisy shortcuts for the contractor’s convenience. Both are unrelated. It was safe before.

This is an unbalanced situation that results in sleep deprivation and health issues for some affected. But there is no compromise for endangerment of health out of convenience and profiteering.

City Council is advised to revise their bylaws to the standards of common sense (and to their climate emergency) and phase out this fossil two-stroke technology. Right now, they come across as not credible.

Until next time…keep on listening – but to real music!

The post Calgary Arts Academy Knobhill Nightly Leaf Blower Noise Nuisance – Seriously Unneighbourly! appeared first on Music For The Masses.

This article summarizes the current issues with the improper use of gas-powered leaf blowers for snow clearing (mainly at night) enabled by a flawed bylaw and the industry lobby in Calgary. This practice has serious adverse effects on people’s health and the local and global environments. Leaf blowers are a pest at any time and should be banned, as done in many civilized places in Canada and the world.

This page is being continuously updated. Stay tuned.

Introduction

This note deals with annoyance and health issues by gas-powered leaf blowers, mainly at night, and with their impact on the environment. Global warming is resulting in the atmosphere carrying increasingly more moisture, which results in more (frequent) precipitation…compare to Calgary’s hail season. In the winter, this means more (frequent) snow clearing…and therefore more (frequent) nuisance. Leaf blowers add their fair share to global warming, which will be discussed below.

Gas-powered leaf blowers emit a loud aggressive noise that is perceived as unpleasant and irritating by most. And they constitute an environmental and health hazard. Since about 2015, they are also being widely used for snow clearing in Calgary – as a perceived shortcut to optimize effectivity and/or company’s profits (depending the way you see it).

It is claimed in this article that the latter is the case: leaf blowers are a habit and not a necessity. They are not even a shortcut in most cases. Nuts don’t need to be cracked with a hammer. Leaf blowers are toxic and a tyranny for many.

Calgary’s Community Standards Bylaw 5M2004 regulates things such as firepits, charity collections,…and noise. But it does not mention the environment or address health. The bylaw was created in 2004 and last amended in 2016.

There has always been a bylaw relaxation, according to which snow removal was allowed night and day within 48 h following a snowfall. When inquiring with the city’s 311 telephone line on 12 January 2018, the advisors had the following information available on their computer screens: “Motorized leaf blower types used to clear snow are NOT included in the 48 h noise relaxation.” “NOT” was capitalized.

And although the bylaw has not changed since, its interpretation has – radically. Calgary’s bylaw department does not even respond to service requests anymore following nightly sleep disturbance through leaf blower noise immediately after/during snowfall.

The City is more interested in going after noisy vehicles (but don’t really pursue this consequently either). Noisy vehicles are a pest, too, but they tend to come and go in an instant.

In contrast, try living across a school where gas-powered leaf blowers scream at you for 20 to 50 mins between 3 am and 5 am, night after night. The City of Calgary thinks this is reasonable…until a councillor or other city official will be personally affected. After all, sleep is a basic health requirement.

In contrast, bylaw officers and police go after leaf blowers at night in the summer. Even a single isolated incident attracted the attention of CTV – and they sent a TV team [here’s their video]. And this one below is mine…this does not sound any different after a snowfall.

The justification for nightly noise harassment and and sleep disturbance is public safety. But this argument is flawed as public safety does not rely on the combination of nightly work AND deployment of unreasonably noisy equipment.

The world was safe in winters before leaf blowers, in Calgary’s case before 2015.

It is really all about a quick buck.

General Problems With Leaf Blowers

The gas-powered leaf blower is a Japanese invention from the 1970s. They arrived in Calgary’s winters only a few years ago – way after the Community Standards Bylaw – and have taken over like the pest.

Questionable Benefits

Leaf blowers mean more income for the snow-clearing companies…as blowing snow is SLOW and superficial. Having crews moving along sidewalks in ultra-slow motion results in more chargeable time.

Leaf blowers also only do a superficial job so there is more need for return visits. Pushing snow along with a snow shovel can be done in fast walking speed, particularly when there is only a film to be removed.

Since the slowest sets the pace not only in math class, Pro Property teams also include a few shovelling workers.

Dedicated snow blowing machines have brushes, they are much more thorough…and they move along much faster. And they are relatively quiet. But they have to be lifted from the vehicle…

Nightly Use: Health Impact through Sleep Disturbance

This is my main reason for writing this article. I can keep it short as it addresses common sense. The problem is that common sense does not appeal to the City of Calgary’s legal department and the companies harassing people at night.

Individual neighbours obviously do not do this to each other for obvious reasons. They have to live side by side.

Noise is unwanted sound. Noise can be harmful to people’s health. The health effect is exacerbated by noise at night as it disturbs people’s sleep: wakes them up, keeps them up for the time of the noise pollution, and may cause difficulties in falling asleep again. In the long run, it may alter people’s sleep rhythm.

In the short run, nightly sleep disturbance results in headaches, fatigue, irritability, and it affects someone’s professional performance and productivity. Apart from that night noise causes annoyance and displeasure.

Do I make this up? No, it comes from the World Health Organization – and simply summarizes common sense.

Do you want to be sleep deprived? Well, then you better don’t live close to a school with an inconsiderate contractor.

While common sense alone suggests that noise will disturb sleep, either by waking the sleeper or by changing the level of sleep, actual measure- ment of the problem is not a simple matter (M.J. Epstein, 2020). Buy the book of this UofC researcher here.

Essential Literature Downloads on Noise Impact:

World Health Organization: Guidelines on Community Noise

World Health Organization: Night Noise Guidelines for Europe

Environmental and Occupational Impact

Leaf Blowers are a potent source of air pollution as a third of the oil-gas mixture is not burned but emitted as an aerosol exhaust. The pollutants (nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, and particulates) have been linked to cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

This 2011 study found that the amount of NMHC pollutants emitted by a leaf blower operated for 30 minutes is comparable to the amount emitted by a Ford F-150 pickup truck driving from Texas to Alaska.

Dust clouds caused by leaf blowers contain potentially harmful substances such as pesticides, mold, and animal feacal matter that may cause irritation, allergies, and disease.

Noise pollution is also a concern with leaf blowers, as they can emit noise levels above those required to cause hearing loss to both the operator and those nearby. Source: Wikipedia.

Bans

Leaf blowers have been banned in some Californian cities since the mid 1970s as a noise nuisance. Today, 20 Californian cities have banned leaf blowers, and 80 have restricted their use. Washington DC banned leaf blowers in 2018, and the sale of gas-powered lawn equipment will be banned in California from 2024.

Canada has been working hard to become an environmental leader for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help mitigate climate change. Ontario, Quebec, and BC have all considered or implemented bans on gas leaf blowers and mowers in specific municipalities. 

The Vancouver City Council has also committed to use only electric lawn maintenance tools by 2024. Many provinces have even banned 2-stroke engines in lakes and waterways.  But the worst culprit for both noise and toxic health and safety emissions on land? The leaf blower.

As far back as 2004, the West End of Vancouver has banned gas-powered leaf blowers.  Montreal had also banned leaf blowers in some suburbs back in 2014.

Noise complaints are the main impetus behind the city council voting these out, where the droning of these blowers echoed down city streets between apartment buildings. This year Victoria council followed suit and advocates for electric blowers in their place. 

But what do you expect from a city where the students’ parents idle outside the school with their trucks and large SUVs twice a day?

What to do about It in Calgary?

Use a shovel, broom, or the much quieter dedicated snow blower for snow removal. And ban this pest. CBC reports here.

The Calgary Community Standards Bylaw – In Dubio Pro Offender

General Noise Loopholes

Calgary bylaws should aim to protect the victims. But, in reality, they are – in my experience – written in favour of the offenders, mainly in order to accommodate and legalize unreasonable commercial interests. Business lobby appears to have ruled city councils through the times – after all, who supports the councillors’ election campaigns?

3 Examples of Bylaw Failure

The first is about air conditioner placement – many others had similar experiences – and Bylaw Services had 1500 calls about AC noise that year:

In 2007, a house flipper put an industrial AC unit underneath my bedroom – after covering his walls (6 ft away) with 1 inch of stucco. He ran it between May and October, even at 3C. The unit caused vibrations of my plastic siding…and a constant low-frequency drone sound inside my house. The bylaw officers refused to measure the noise at the property line (30 cm away from the unit) and advised us to move.

According to the bylaw, any measurements are to be taken “at any point of reception”. It is totally up to the officer at which location that is (which means the results are not reproducible…or, in scientific terms, that the precision “reproducibility of results” is zero).

Any decent legal document needs fixed reference points for measurements such as the property line to be meaningful. The Calgary Community Standards Bylaw is not worth the paper it is printed on. Cities in hotter climates such as in Australia have these reference points clearly defined – and it is just a matter of googling for their bylaws.

In another example, some 15 years ago, hockey player Iginla positioned two AC units on his property line, right in front of the neighbour’s Bungalow’s bedroom. Mrs Iginla advised the neighbour to move their bed away from the wall. The neighbour was even on CBC’s Eyeopener – and the City remained tone deaf.

5 years ago, a new neighbour placed their hot tub on the back patio of our attached houses. She is hearing impaired but the constant 2-3 hr low-frequency drone was driving me crazy in my office. We could amicably resolve this by her running the tub’s heater after business hours.

Noise Aspects missing in the Community Standards Bylaw

The community standards bylaw only considers noise quantity (measured in dBA), but not quality. A very-low frequency drone sound will barely yield 30 dBA, but be excavating on most people within a few minutes (compare to a dripping faucet). It is well established in the scientific literature that it is harmful to health.

A masterfully played violin at 65 dBA may sound pleasant over 90 mins, a drill certainly not. The difference between all these is that drone sound (AC, drill) is repetitive and static whereas a voice or violin is variable as it changes frequencies and sound pressure level (“volume”) all the time. The latter is much more tolerable.

Another aspect in bylaws of more mature communities is considering reflective walls. An AC between 2 infills 6 ft apart will emit sound waves that reverberate between the house walls, which amplifies the noise: the famous “gun barrel effect”. Therefore AC placement is important for noise impact.

In summary, whoever has drafted up this bylaw has insufficient understanding of the basic physics – and zero common sense.

Leaf Blower Noise Loopholes

Leaf blowers were explicitly banned at night a few years ago – and the bylaw’s wording has not changed since.

What has changed is the interpretation of the bylaw text when somebody found a loophole in the wording: an ambiguous text passage is interpreted in favour of the offender – out of fear the city could loose the battle in court. Suddenly the banned leaf blowers were allowed again – out of the blue. A true paradox!

As a result of the city’s incompetence, the bylaw’s simplified web version is even more removed from the original bylaw and from reality:

Many people rely on motorized equipment to clear snow, including City crews. Noise restrictions for using such equipment are lifted for 48 hours after a snowfall ends to clear walkways for safety and accessibility. This means anyone is allowed to operate a motorized snow clearing device (including leaf and snow blowers) — at any time of day/night — during that 48-hour window to remove snow and ice. ​Outside of that window, night use is not permitted. For more information, download the Community Standards Bylaw​ and refer to sections 31.1(e) and 31.1(2).

Sidewalks have become walkways and leaf blowers are now snow removal devices. You find the problem with the wording behind this spoiler:

Abuse of Bylaw Relaxation

Snow-clearing/landscaping companies have much experience with police encounters and bylaw officers from their illegal nightly summer work. Since the city is typically business friendly, nothing happens to them. They can be even more relaxed when backed by a bylaw relaxation (anything goes within 48 hrs of a snowfall) or when arguing with safety, particularly when children are involved.

But the bylaw relaxation gives no incentive for these companies to work efficiently, and community or environmentally friendly.

Leaf Blowers and Calgary’s Climate Emergency Declaration

On November 15, 2021, Calgary City Council voted to declare a Climate Emergency. A declaration of Climate Emergency is a resolution passed by a governing body such as a city council. It puts the local government on record in support of emergency action to respond to climate change, and recognizes the pace and scale of action needed.

Calgary subscribed to making climate change a strategic priority and taking action on climate change – while bending all possible bylaws and rules of decency to cater to industry lobby allowing the use of leaf blowers, one of the biggest environmental pests around.

Considering that City Council has refused to understand, let alone taken action on any noise pollution issue that had been on their agenda for the last 20 years, nobody is surprised by their clownery.

This hardly comes as a surprise considering Alberta has always been (one of the) last with most progress in Canada, for example the introduction of seat belts, distracted driving, smoking laws etc.

Open Questions

The above treatment results in the following questions for you, dear reader:

• Do you think it is reasonable having to put up with sleep disturbance by aggressive noise night after night?
• Do you think you should put up with such noise at any time?
• Why do bylaw makers think using motorized garden tools at night is unreasonable in summer but not in winter?
• Why was it possible for the city to interpret their own bylaw first contra and then pro nightly leaf blower relaxation?
• Why should public safety rely on the use of leaf blowers? They are a 1940s invention, but have only been widely used in the last 10 years in Calgary.
• If public safety relies on leaf blowers, how unsafe was the public before?
• Why does City Council not ban leaf blowers simply on the basis of their horrific environmental impact? After all, the city has declared a climate emergency.
• How does city view that feedback loop according to which global warming increases precipitation – and leaf blowers are a major contributor to global warming.

Concluding Remarks

In summary, the City of Calgary adheres to their flawed interpretation of their botched Community Standards Bylaw 5M2004, out of fear of losing court battles against businesses that feel entitled to impose themselves on neighbourhoods. Common sense does not appear to be an argument.

The City’s inaction is in stark contrast to their climate emergency and public and occupational health.

Calgary City Council is advised to revise their bylaws to the standards of common sense and adapt it to their climate emergency declaration and the reality of ever increasing precipitation. Right now, they have no credibility. No city councillor or reasonable person would put up with such ongoing nuisance personally – and should not, according to the bylaw, section 27. (1):

Except as authorized pursuant to this Bylaw, no Person shall make or cause or allow to be made or continued any noise which would disturb or annoy a reasonable person.

But acccording to the city’s bylaw interpretation, such reasonable persons don’t exist. They never have. As former mayor Nenshi would say: “this bylaw is hot garbage”.

The city will have to catch up with the times and get rid of this environmental and occupational pest – period, it is just a matter of time. Get civilized!

Until next time…keep on listening – but to real music!

The post Calgary Leaf Blower Noise Nuisance: Health Hazard And Environmental Impact, Night And Day appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Gear of the Year: 2022 marks the blog’s fourth year. We collectively published 100-150 articles, mainly product reviews, but also technical information (such as earphone modding). Apart from receiving review units from manufacturers and sellers, we also purchased a lot…and we borrowed from audiophile friends and colleagues.

Our list of earphone reviews is going towards 400, which is a very useful database. And one of the world’s biggest. In the DAC and amplification department we have also reached a respectable 70.

While we shrank from 8 to 6 authors, we essentially doubled our viewer numbers and currently record well over 1000 daily individual blog visitors (1377 on Black Friday 2022). But we remain humble, continue viewing our hobby as labour of love and focus on information for you, the reader, while not selling out.

Another very popular list is our Wall of Excellence, which hosts gear not approved by one of us, but by the whole team. This is a useful filter for you and should give you confidence in your buying decisions.

And yes, we searched for and found an exclusive sponsor in HiFiGo, who help us with our basic operating cost (web hosting). We still chip a lot of our own money in for mailing between us reviewers, import charges etc.

By having a single sponsor (and not Google ads) paying us a moderate flat fee, we don’t rely on viewer numbers. For you, this means no popups and no ads between paragraphs, nothing in your way when reading our articles. All advertisement takes place in the top toolbar and the sidebar. Feel free to check it out.

We also continue refraining from affiliate links as it still leaves a bad taste in our mouths.

As at the end of the previous years, we list our our personal favourites of 2022 – the portable audio we personally enjoyed most. There are no rules, we just tell you what we like. It does not have to be the latest. After all, the gear we use most is the best for us. Between us, the Dunu Zen, 7Hz Timeless, Final ZE3000, and Questyle M15 received the most mentionings. The Questyle M15 appears to be the most highly acclaimed dongle in the blogosphere period and may as well be the “Product of the Year” all around.

We don’t publish any “best of” lists as we have not tested all competitors in each category.

Enjoy this read and we wish you a happy and successful 2023!

We thank

And here we go…that’s what we enjoyed in 2022…

Alberto Pittaluga… Bologna, ITALY

My 18 readers know that I’m much more into enjoying better sound than into getting excited about sidegrades or other small changes from my existing preferences. I am the polar opposite of a marketing hype target individual – on pretty much any topic by the way. I mean: try and sell me a “better” (?) Moka coffee machine…

With that in mind, and considering that I’m not into this since yesterday evening, it’s quite logical that the list of the really significant items out of all those I come across over a year’s time is short. Here’s what I found in 2022 which is worth recommending.

IEMS

Intime Miyabi – a great piece of engineering ticking most if not all boxes for my tastes. Beyond details, one of the absolute best sound delivery experiences one can buy (well… some personal initiative is required to fetch it from Japan) below 500$… spending less than half of it. My report here.

RHA CL2 – I heard quite a few planar IEMs, and not a single one “closes the door” for me. Long story short, none offers me a well-articulated-enough sound experience out of the box, and none carries a driver good enough to be equalised into something I really like. The sole exception I ever came across yet is this RHA CL2 – a dated model indeed, which I had the venture to audition this year for my first time. More on this on my piece about it.

DAC/AMP Dongles

Questyle M15 – no doubt the “best overall quality” battery-less DAC/AMP (“dongle”) at any price. Paired with a small transport easily makes all sub-800$, and most sub-2K$ DAPs pointless in terms of sound quality delivery (some may still prefer “some” DAP for better pocketability convenience or specific features). Firstly reviewed in depth by Jurgen here, you can read my incremental notes here.

E1DA 9038SG3 and 9038D – the M15 is what it is, but it also is relatively expensive (almost 300€ once delivered to Italy). My previous experience taught that me that exclusively higher-tier (and price) dongles are able to deliver sound qualities worth investing in more money than the 9$ price tag asked for an Apple Dongle ($9). Then I found these two gems which fulfill the need for incredibly clean and powerful sound for less than half M15’s price, and 90% of its proficiency.

Biodegraded…Vancouver, CANADA

7Hz Timeless:
Despite a somewhat elevated and loose midbass, these have great overall tonal balance, smooth mids, excellent instrument separation and layering, and speed. Macrodynamics are on the soft side, which might not be for everybody; and the fit will be problematic for people with concha bowls on the smaller side. They work best with warmer, dynamic sources.

Durwood…Chicago, USA

Swimming in dongles I don’t have a favorite, Moodrop Dawn has the selectable gain, others like the Shanling UP3 have single and balanced outputs and controls. Take your pick. I would like selectable gain AND single ended/balanced outputs.

Desktop DAC goes to the SMSL C200 for best value and sound that hangs near the top dogs. I personally prefer separate pieces for the ability to have more connection options and swapping but for near double the price I don’t see double the performance. The SMSL SU-9 is excellent for me I ended up buying one on the second hand market. The SMSL DO100/HO100 is great too and bit more user friendly for the size.

For earphones I still love my Shozy Form 1.4 for the bass tuning, warm signature and superb fitment YMMV. There are lots of excellent performers if just factoring in sound and technical merits including the 7Hz Timeless and Moondrop Kato, but I struggle keeping them in place. For those starting out or not a lot to spend, my budget pick for what is available would be the CCA Lyra.

For TWS, I only have 3 pairs to compare-but if I don’t need ANC, I would pick the Moondrop Alice all day everyday. Review coming soon, they are a wireless Kato and they nailed all the important features (sound, battery life, control, fitment), form follows function.

Jürgen Kraus…Calgary, CANADA

In terms of earphones, I continue liking the JVC HA-FDX1, the Dunu Zen, and the Final E5000. The Zen remain my go-tos. New on my list are the LETSHUOER EJ7M (great allrounders), the Final A3000 & E3000, and the very articulate Dunu Talos. But the earphone I used most in 2022 is the superb Final ZE3000 TWS.

As to headphones, my Sennheiser HD 600 have received company by the Final Sonorous III. On the budget side, I added the excellent KTXPro1 to my Koss selection (Porta Pros, KPHi-30, and KSC75).

I am principally a “portable guy” who used to operate his iPhone with a dongle, mainly the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt. Whilst the Cobalt remains a standard staple of mine, the excellent Questyle M15 (and here too) is a great alternative for my higher current-drawing headphones/earphones – and my personal product of the year 2022.

For driving full-sized headphones and single DD items, nothing beats the Apogee Groove. For Bluetooth DAC/amp, I exclusively use the very mature Qudelix-5K. And for earphone testing, I am still holding on to the totally underappreciated Earstudio HUD100.

The Hidizs AP80 Pro-X has proven a great dap for me, no matter if used alone or as transport with a dongle. The Sony NW-A55 with Mr Walkman firmware also remains in my collection of favourites. And the very crisp sounding Questyle QP1R remains my flagship dap. The biggest surprise for me was the Tempotec V6 dap…essentially a $500 device at half price.

For my desktop setup, I am holding on to EarMen Tradutto DAC in combination with the Burson Funk amp and AudioQuest analog and digital interconnects.

Kazi Mahbub Mutakabbir…Munich, GERMANY

Just like that, another year went by. This year was special for me as I got to visit High End Munich 2021 (which happened after a 3-year hiatus) and also got to meet some great reviewers and legends of the industry in person.

Best Headphones: This year, I have slowly transitioned from portable audio into desktop audio. A knock-on effect of that has been my growing headphone collection. What used to be a mere 4 headphones last year, has grown into a whooping 25 now.

Yup, I need another shelf.

Speaking of the best headphones, Hifiman HE-6se V2 got the most use this year from me. I still use the Sennheiser HD650 whenever I feel like relaxing, but for my playlist – the Hifimans absolutely slap!

That being said, they aren’t the best headphones that I’ve tried this year. That recognition goes to the venerable Stax SR-X9000. Still underrated in the summit-fi segment, these overtook Susvara for me in almost every aspect. They are build better, has better sense of space, bass is better defined and slams a bit harder, and of course – the ethereal treble is an absolute joy.

Too bad that the price tag (with energizer) makes these nigh-unobtainable for me. Doesn’t make them any less awesome, though.

Best IEMs: Dunu Zen remains my daily driver, and they scale tremendously with desk sources, so I am a happy camper.

Speaking of camps, Campfire Audio Holocene has sneaked their way into my daily rotation. Probably my most favorite Campfire Audio IEMs, ever. They deserve a lengthy, long-term review, which is in the pipeline.

This year I also had to wade through loads of “meh” IEMs, each mimicking a certain “scientifically perfect” (lol) curve in one way or another, and each sounding boring and unremarkable. But the one IEMs that kept the fire alive was the Softears Turii.

Exceptional in almost every sense, their fit is the biggest concern, but with Spinfit W1 tips (excellent tips btw, recommended) I found them stable enough to enjoy outdoors. Too bad that they’re discontinued.

The Softears Twilight is a spiritual successor of sorts. Doesn’t have the crazy sense of space that the Turii portray, but pretty much beats every other single dynamic I’ve tried under USD $1000 (and I have tried nearly all of the hyped ones by now). So yeah, Softears, take a bow!

Desktop DAC and Amp: Questyle CMA Fifteen takes the cake for the best all-in-one system that I’ve heard. Near-endgame for 99% out there I’d say. Drives almost everything with authority. What’s not to like? Oh yes, the price. Something’s gotta give after all.

As for standalone units, the best solid-state amp I’ve tried: Zaehl HM1. As for the best tube amp: Feliks Envy, or the Feliks Euforia AE. Two very different price-points, but both about the best tube amps you can buy right now.

DACs are a bit difficult for me to judge, and the ones I’ve tried this year couldn’t replace the Holo May L3 I tried last year, so that one still reigns supreme.

Portable DAC/Amp: Questyle came outta nowhere with the M15 (and here too) and seized the day. Nothing else comes close, really. On the higher side of the price, Chord Mojo 2 is an excellent device. For using with IEMs and moderately efficient headphones – that’s all you’ll ever need. The DAC section is kilobuck-level as well.

Surprise of the Year: Final ZE3000.

I do not like wireless stuff at all, mostly because of how poor and compressed 99% of them sound. This one caught be off-guard. I bought them only to review them, fully expecting to put them up for sale once the review is done.

Now, three months later, I carry them everywhere and despite the finicky touch controls, I keep coming back to them. Only the Sony WH-1000XM4 sound as good as them, and they cost 2x the price. To think that Final would come up with one of the best TWS IEMs around – didn’t see that one coming.

Then again, who else would be that methodical?

Loomis Johnson…Chicago, USA

IEMs:

Moondrop Starfield—my default rec to folks who ask me which <$100 phone to buy…big-sounding, with seamless coherence and as lot of PRAT.

7Hz Timeless—polarizing and imperfect (there’s some stridency at the highest frequencies), but technically very accomplished and highly resolving. The more I hear ‘em the more I dig ‘em.

Tin HiFi TWS Buds 3—light on features (no app, no ANC) but beautifully built and a really engaging listen, with very good imaging and instrument placement.

AXS Audio Professional Wireless Earbuds—generic-looking, with a modest soundstage, but probably the best-sounding TWS I’ve heard to date. 

Portable DAC/Dongles:

Xumee USB-C—lots of power and surprising finesse for less than the price of a six pack.

Hidisz S3Pro—a really refined performer which synergizes well with anything under 150 oHm.

Headphones:

1More Sonoflow Wireless ANC—you can pay a lot more for punchier sound or more tech features, but these are an awful lot of headphone for the money, with good noise-cancelling, an unforced natural tonality and fantastic battery life.

Koss KTXPro1—uber-comfortable and musical as hell; for $19 there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t own a pair.

Bluetooth Speakers:

Oontz Angle 3—diminutive, seemingly indestructible cheapo with surprisingly good bass output and an enveloping 3D soundstage.

Edifier R1280DB Bookshelf Speakers—I gave a set of these to the owner of a cannabis dispensary, whose customers rave incessantly about how good they sound even before imbibing.

Desktop DAC:

SMSL SU-6—a more than capable DAC, with excellent bass control and a very detailed (if occasionally overbright) high end; digital preamp and Bluetooth functionality are big plusses. Outstanding value.

KopiOkaya…SINGAPORE

The editor: although KopiOkaya retired a year ago (on his own terms), he keeps his eartips compendium up to date. His list has been a cornerstone of this block and its most successful article. It currently records somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 views.

Best under $50 IEM:

7HZ SALNOTES ZERO

Best under $100 IEM:

DUNU KIMA

Best IEM of 2022:

SOFTEARS TURII Ti

Best dongle DAC/AMP of 2022:

QUESTYLE M15 (here and here)

Best portable DAP of 2022:

TEMPOTEC V6

Best budget DAC/AMP combo:

SMSL SH-9 THX AAA-888

Best desktop DAC of the 2022:

HOLO MAY KTE (KITSUNE EDITION)

Best desktop headphone amp of 2022:

QUESTYLE CMA FIFTEEN

Best eartips of the 2022

SPINFIT W1

Most outstanding audio product of 2022:

QUESTYLE M15 (here and here)

And This Was The Previous Year:

The post Gear Of The Year 2022 – Our Personal Favourites appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Current-hungry DACs drain our DAP/Android Devices fast – and Apple’s current-draw limit frequently just results in an error message. The solution is an external power bank – which is easy in the DAP/Android case, but still problematic with iOS devices. Here’ s how to do it…with the E1DA splitter (2 kinds) and the Apple Camera Adapter.

This article is based on discussions with Alberto and I thank him for his insights…which have cost me lots of sweat in the meantime. Gordon Rankin or Wavelength Audio pointed the Apple restrictions out to me. I purchased all these cables myself. My testing refers to extreme cases. The E1DA splitters work as advertised as they are optimized for their own products.

Introduction

Dongles are little DAC/amps that draw their operating current from the host, which is either a computer, phone, DAP, or tablet. They have the advantage that they do not subscribe to planned obsolescence as they do not rely on an internal battery that dictates their life span. And they are small because of it. That’s why I like them.

There are principally two kinds of dongles, such that limit current draw to preserve the host’s battery, and such that…don’t (I wrote about this here). The first are limited in their performance, and the second drain the host (too) fast. Remember the 36 hours we got out of our iPod Classics?

Apple adds the “fun fact” of limiting current draw to 100 mA for most of their iOS devices. Reason is their fear of dissatisfied customers falsely claiming battery failure on warranty when their phones’s batteries drain “too fast”. If we connect our dongle with a current draw exceeding 100 mA, we get no music but a cryptic error message instead. Not good.

There are exceptions, when the iOS device is fooled to believe the draw is below 100 mA…by means of fudging the descriptor table in the software (according to Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio). Hidizs S9 Pro and ifi Go Bar (both around 140 mA), for example, appear to get around the restrictions, as both work with my iPhone SE (1st gen.), Astell & Kern’s PEE51 does not.

Luckily, some third-party Lightning cables exist that trick the iPhone to believe the current draw is lower than 100 mA…which is only a short-term solution, as it does not stop the battery from draining fast. E1DA have published a useful spreadsheet that tells you which Lightning cables work with which iPhones with their 9038SG3 and 9038D DACs (which draw above 130 mA).

Android devices and most DAPs are more forgiving – and work even with the biggest current w**res (excuse my Italian). But not for long in each case before you have to hook your device back up to the charger.

Therefore, in order not to run out of juice prematurely – and to entice Apple devices to play through our monster dongles – we need to use an external power source to drive those – and the readiness of the host to accept them.

The theory is simple: just separate power line and data line in the cable connecting host and dongle. As a result, the dongle draws its power from an external 5V power bank (or out of our 5V wall charger), and its data (“music”) from the phone/DAP/tablet. Computers are exempt in our discussion as they always provide enough power to any dongle (USB 2 up to 500 mA).

Stop! The theory may be easy for Android devices/DAPS, but things can be way more complicated for iOS devices, when the 100 mA current-draw limit needs to be circumvented.

What we need for DAPs/Android devices is a splitter cable (with separate data line and power line), an external battery, and the music host. This also works for iOS devices with <100 mA draw, but the Apple Camera Adapter is needed for anything higher. And that’s not all: you also need an MFI-certified USB-A (or USB-C) Lightning charging cable to make it work. Let’s test all possible cases.

DAPs/Android Devices with external Battery and E1DA Splitter

The easy case first to warm you up for things to come. What we need:

• Music source
• $4.99 E1DA USB-C to USB-C splitter cable
• Power bank
• Dongle (here the current hungry, 280 mA consuming, very powerful Apogee Groove…with micro USB to USB-C adapter
• Headphone

We plug it all in – and it works. The source device is not charged during music play and the Groove receives the required current from the power bank. Easy peasy!

iOS Devices with external Battery and E1DA Splitter vs. Apple Camera Adapter

1. Dongles with a Current Draw <100 mA (or a Software Manipulation pretending it is <100 mA) –> E1DA Splitter and Apple Camera Adapter work

Well, that’s smooth when the connected dongle draws less than 100 mA as it essentially works like the DAPs/Android device above. It just need a different E1DA USB-C to Lightning splitter cable that sets you back $19.99. Just in the case above, your iOS device is not being charged during operation.

2. Dongles with a Current Draw >100 mA (and without Software Manipulation pretending it is <100 mA) –> only Apple Camera Adapter works, E1DA Splitter does not

In this case, the E1DA USB-C to Lightning cable does not work. All you get is an error message. The power bank fuels the Groove properly, but there is no chip telling the iPhone it does actually not have to supply power to the Groove. Hence the iPhone reacts as it would without power bank: it does not want to do it. Thank you, Apple.

We still can drive the Groove but need different equipment to do so. Please fasten your seat belt! We need the following ingredients:

• iOS device
• $49 Apple Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter
• Power bank
• MFI-certifed Lightning charge cable
• Dongle (here again the current hungry, 280 mA consuming, very powerful Apogee Groove)
• Micro USB to USB-A cable
• Headphone

This works beautifully. The power bank funnels current into the Apple Camera Adapter with its controller chip that informs the iPhone that it does not have to supply current to the Groove. And the Groove draws its power from the power bank, which is controlled by the iPhone. On top of that, the iPhone charges while playing.

But there is still another hurdle: the charging cable has to be MFI certified to be able to communicate with the Apple Camera Adapter’s controller chip. Lightning cables by Amazon (Basics), Apple, IKEA, Startech and UGreen worked in my tests, OTG cables by ifi Audio, ddHiFi, and OE Audio did not (they are unidirectional “the wrong way” and not designed for charging). No power through the latter – and the well known error message appears on my iPhone. Bummer!

Concluding Remarks

Driving dongles with DAPS/Android devices and power bank using the E1DA USB-C to USB-C splitter cable works universally.

In contrast, iPhones (tested with SE 1st gen. and 13) do not like to draw zero current when they are not told to do so by a controller chip. As it appears, the Apple Camera Adapter draws some current from the iPhone but also from the power bank. E1DA’s USB-C to Lightning splitter works different from Apple’s Camera Adapter as it talks to the dongle and not to the iPhones’s power management. Therefore, iPhone does not charge while being connected to the E1DA splitter.

And I wished E1DA added a chip (as in Apple’s Camera Adapter) to make their Lightning splitter universally usable (Apple apparently makes this impossible for audio designers without an MFI license – and E1DA are probably not an accredited MFI contract manufacturer). E1DA’s USB-C to Lightning splitter is therefore of limited use for third-party dongles – but it works as intended with E1DA’s own DACs. This cable is not MFI certified.

As a rule of thumb, E1DA’s USB-C to Lightning splitter will only work with dongles that iPhone believes are drawing less than 100 mA current. And Apple’s Camera Adapter only works with MFI-certified charge cables. Nothing is perfect.

Until next time…keep on listening!

Contact us!

The post Driving Power-Hungry Dongles With DAPs/Android Devices and iPhone (E1DA Splitter and Apple Camera Adapter Review) appeared first on Music For The Masses.

It took me so long to make myself a decently clear idea about this topic that I eventually took a breath and put it down in form of a single (hopefully) organised story. Enjoy!

The problem we have, and how does it matter

DACs’ business is receiving digital files and re-convert them into analog electrical signals. Such signals are then amplified and sent to drivers (big loudspeakers or small IEMs, it doesn’t matter now) to become audible music.

Sadly while doing its job a DAC, any DAC, fatally produces “spurious copies” of each note. .

Such unwanted “note replicas” are higher frequency copies of their relavant intended note, and such “higher” frequencies are beyond the humanly audible range. That’s why we call such artefact notes “Ultrasonic images“.

If they are not audible why the heck do we care about them? For two reasons.

First reason: the frequencies at which these notes are generated are not audible by our ears, but are significant for our physical drivers (the tweeters in our speakers) – which overheat and overwear and can even break if they receive them or they receive them “too loud”. Indeed, on a wider horizon, the DAC might also produce or anyhow transmit various other forms on unwanted high or very high frequency “notes”.

For this reason alone we should find a way to avoid or kill such images, like any other ultra high frequency stuff.

The second reason is a bit more complicated.

On certain conditions when two notes close to one another are played, a sort of “reciprocal disturbance” happens between such two notes. That’s called “Inter-Modulation Distortion” (IMD).

Let’s get this picture as a conceptual example:

Suppose our “real” notes are the two big peaks in the center. Sometimes, they will “autogenerate” those shorter and leaner ones you see at their sides, one on the left (lower frequency), one on the right (higher frequency). The picture shows a case with only 2 spurious notes generated, but they could be more.

Now let’s suppose that the left real note in our example actually is one of those unwanted Ultrasonic Images produced by our DAC. As we said above, it will be on a too high frequency to be heard. Let’s suppose it’s at 21Khz. So of course it won’t be audible but big chances are that it’s “left side baby copy” might well be “distant enough” from “mummy” as to fall below 20KHz, so within the hearable frequency range.

That’s why this is called “fold-back effect”, and that’s the second important reason why we need to help our DAC getting rid of high frequency images generated during the reconstruction process in the first place.

Summary: DACs produce spurious ultrasonic images. Those need to be taken care of to prevent damage to drivers, and audible sound alterations.

The solution, and its drawbacks

How do we get rid of the ultrasonic images? With a filter.

That is, with some circuitry that (simplistically put) makes sure that once the DAC has done its job reconstructing our wanted music + those extra unwanted notes at higher-then-audible frequencies, a cut down is imposed on all frequencies above the maximum humanly audible level – effectively “filtering” them off.

No ultrasonic images, of course, so also no “fold-back” IMD-generated audible spurious notes.

Was it so easy? Well no, not so easy.

This filter we need is an electrical circuit and as such not “perfectly ideal” as we would dream it to be. If by my description above you imagined a sort of guillotine blade cutting the crap out, with no side effects, well… no.

What we would ideally want it a filter that leaves audible music totally unoutched, and kills all and only those ultrasonic images. Instead, real world filters will either let some of those ultrasonic images pass through, or apply some change to audible music, or both.

Depending on how it’s realised, the filter will have inaccuracies and side effects that we can’t entirely avoid. Such imperfections can first of all be more or less important depending on the original music’s sampling rate, and besides that the unwanted audible sonic changes might be more or less unwelcome by each particular user.

So that’s why it’s in a sense nice if a DAC device offers a choice amongst different filters: we will end up choosing the best – or least bad, if you wish – one depending on our tastes.

So let me explain about these filters imperfections and how they impact on our music. Let’s start with the inaccuracies.

Fast and slow filters

To describe how these filters work we use certain methods and graphical representations. Here is one.

This graph shows the behaviour of 3 different filters as they are implemented on a certain DAC. Forget about the specific DAC model now, this is just to describe in principle how these filters work and inhowmuch can they be different from one another.

This graph plots the attenuation (the reduction of “loudness”) that each filter imposes to the analog signal (our music) that’s coming out of the DAC.

On the X axis we have the frequencies. Remember human audible music gets as high as 20Khz.

On the Y axis we have the output “power” reduction which that filter applies, expressed in dB. Zero dB = zero impact. -110dB = shut up!

The signal being processed (the “music”) in this specific case is white noise, so a sort of “artificial music” composed of notes of all frequencies, all at the same power level. The white noise sampling rate in this example is 44.1Khz.

If there weren’t any filter, the graph would be an horizontal line accross the entire graph space, stuck on 0dB.

Let’s look at the graph lines, starting by following them from their upper left point, where they hit against the Y axis, and going towards the right.

All lines are equally flat up there, one on top of the other, and they all indicate zero dB attenuation (marked on the Y axis).  That means: all those filters apply no attenuation at all on all frequencies until… (follow the plots going right by at the same time reading down on the X  axis) …at least until 18KHz.

If we now keep “going right” from 18KHz, we see the various plot lines spreading apart.

The green and the purple lines are the first which start to “go down” right after 18Khz. The red line stays instead flat horizontal, stuck on 0dB attenuation, until above 21KHz.

The green line “drops” faster than the purple one. At 20KHz the green line is already at approx -12dB, while the purple line is still around -5dB. The green line “drops dead” (-110dB attenuation or so) just above 22Khz. The purple line reaches the same “full attenuation” level not before 28KHz.

So what does this mean?

We know that ultrasonic images can only happen above 50% of the input sampling frequency, in this case 22.05KHz.

The graphs tell us that the “green filter” (i.e. the filter represented by the green line) gives full attenuation to all signals lower than just above 22KHz so our green guy will kill all our ultrasonic images, we won’t get any.

Viceversa the purple filter will take its sweeter time before dropping down, and will let quite some ultrasonic images pass through. All those until approx 28KHz will pass, although progressively more and more attenuated as their frequency goes up.

Both the green and the purple filter also have a visibile drawback: they both start their job from 18KHz, which is still within the audible range.

While “dropping faster” to be able to cut everything above 22Khz, the green filter applies a stronger cut on the higher part of the audible range (-12dB or so at 20KHz, which is a lot). The purple filter is more permissive with images, but also less punitive on trebles (only -5dB or so at 20Khz).

Let’s look at the red line now.

Its vertical part is visually roughly parallel to the green one, it’s just offset towards the right by 2KHz.

So how does the red filter work? Test if you got the drill from above.

Summarising: all these filters have some sort of inaccuracy. These of graphs tell us that which sound frequencies are cut down by our filters, and how much power do our filters take off from them (zero, full, or something in between).

One filter makes fewer frequencies pass, the other lets more of them through. And this, already, prompts us to wonder which option is best for us.

But before that, let’s investigate about filters’ side effects.

Ringing, everywhere

Let’s talk about the frequencies (the musical notes) which our filter lets through.

Shall those notes pass through really unmodified ?  Or will the filter introduce any audible modification to them?

To study how these filters behave in terms of transparency we use a different test procedure, and graph. While before we submitted “all frequencies at once” (white noise) to the filter, now we’ll oppositely submit just one note to the filter – an as “neat”, quick, sharp and clean note as possible. And we’ll plot what our device (the filter) outputs as a result.

We call such single clean input note “impulse”. And the output is an “impulse response”.

We can imagine to create a pure impulse as a digital file where all samples are set at zero value (representing pitch black silence of course), and just one sample has the digital value of a single, loud note.

Assuming that note plays at a frequency which the filter is not attenuating, an ideal filter will of course reconstruct precisely that note in analogue form, and nothing else. Will a real world filter behave differently?

This is a good first example of impulse response graph.

(For the illustrations I am helping myself with the pictures published within this article, which is very well written by the way, and might also be interesting for you to take a look at).

On the X axis there’s time. On the Y (vertical) axis there is Voltage, so ultimately output power.

The plot of an ideal filter applied to the DAC’s reconstruction of an ideal impulse would be a dead flat horizontal line at 0 Volts (total silence), until a precise time where voltage pops up for a very brief moment (the Impulse), and then comes immediately back down to zero, to continue dead flat onto zero forever thereafter.

The picture above is instead the plot of a real world situation.

The peak in the middle is what we expected: the impulse note reconstructed based on the single <>0 digital sample in the input file. So far so good.

The unexpected part is those ripples to the left (so, in time, before the note) and to the right (so right after the note).

If the note we are talking about is audible, those ripples will be audible in terms of (faint) “fringes” to the notes. That note will not come across perfectly neat as it should. Ideally we would not want those ripples then, but let’s not commit suicide yet. The ripples before the note are called “pre-ringing” by the way, those after are called “post-ringing”.

The graph above reports the impulse response of a fast filter.

If you remember, a fast filter is what in general seems most desireable as it cuts ultrasonic images quickly. Now we find a quite important drawback though: a fast filter adds unwanted note alterations both before and after each note.

Let’s see how a slow filter behaves:

The central part is very similar of course, but the ripples (the “ringing”) are minimal in comparison to the fast filter case.

So we know from the previous chapter that the slow filter is less effective in terms of ultrasonic images cutting, but it turns out to be much less impactful in terms of changes on the musical notes themselves.

Ringing, single-sidedly

The fast and slow filters we saw in the previous chapter produce more or less ringing both before and after their impulse response, are sometimes called “linear phase” filters.

In tech talk, the “phase” of filter refers to a delay. Too complicated. Here, let’s concentrate on the effects more than on the technical causes.

On linear phase filters the impulse energy is in its maximum part concentrated at the exact time when the note needs to be played, with some fringes of energy “escaping” some time before and some time after the pulse. The two filters we saw before obey to this decription: the high peak is in the center of their graph, and the ripples are at both its sides.

Other filters can be created which instead concentrate the maximum part of the incoming energy at the beginning of the impulse response, and overflow only onto the time past that. Like this:

A filter like this is called a “minimum phase” filter.

The impulsive part (the main note) is totally similar to the fast, linear phase sibling. The ripples, however, are only after the note.

Open brackets. As you’ll notice this graph has “a lot” of ripples – although only on the right side – so this will be a “fast, minimum phase” filter. Close brackets.

The amplitude of the ripples after the note is bigger (ripples are taller) compared to that of the ripples before or after the note observed in the “fast, linear” case. Indeed, it’s double. The fact is that the total energy is the same: in the linear case it gets distributed “a bit before and a bit after” the “main event”, here instead the ex-flow it’s all “delayed to after” the peak note.

Soooo……. there is no pre-ringing!

Lastly, let’s consider a “slow, minimum phase” filter. How will it be?

As expected: similarly to the “slow, linear phase” case the ripples are minimal compared to the fast alternative, and similarly to the “slow, minimum phase” case the ripples are only after the impulse. No pre-ringing.

There are quite a few other ways to build reconstruction filters but it was never my intention to write an encyclopedia. These 4 cases are quite enough for us to get where the main trick stays.

Ringing ?

I mentioned before that we would ideally want ringing not to be there at all.  Do we really ?  Less than it seems, actually. That, for two reasons.

First reason.

It’s crucial to note that our internal auditory organs… do ring too.

When our internal ear receives an “impulse” (a relatively strong, sudden sound) our organs will vibrate in conjunction with that note… and for a short time after it. This is so physiological that our brain… knows!

Our perception of a “neat” (not reverberating, not “persisting”) sound is the result of an originally neat note hitting our ears. There, some human post-ringing is added, then it all goes to the brain which… subtracts (tares off, if you wish) the ringing and tells us that the note was “neat”.

On the flip side, our ear organs do not pre-ring when they receive a sound. So when our brain gets some “thing” coming before a sound it will “remark it immediately” as “odd”.

Given this, a filter-inducted note post-ringing will actually be much less important that it seems on paper. As long as it is modest in amplitude and/or length it will be masked in full or in part by our physiological system.

The filter’s pre-ringing instead, that will most matter. As our brain does not know what pre-ringing even means (!) a note affected by even modest pre-ringing will first of all be decoded as “strange”, “not totally right”.

Second reason.

Ringing will not happen on each single note played by the DAC. Oppositely, it will happen only on somewhat “unlegit” notes: e.g. those connected with clipping, or with pre-existant ringing.

As it looks, then, we should never actually have ringing as long as we listen to good quality digital tracks. Do we?

Yes, precisely. Too bad that “good quality digital tracks” are surprisingly rare. Ever heard of Loudness War for example? Good audiophile-quality masters are, indeed, extremely rare to find. The last place where to look for some in my experience is an online streaming service (any online streaming service). But that’s another story.

Connecting some dots

Let’s summarise what we learnt until now:

• Bloody DACs create unwanted artefact notes
• Such artefacts only appear at frequencies higher than 50% of the original digital file sampling rate (so e.g. for a 44.1KHz file they start happening above 22.05KHz)
• Those artefacts need to be removed as they create problems both audible (affecting the music) and non audible (affecting audio devices)
• To remove them we use filters, which are engineered in different possible ways
• Filters of different types have different scope/efficiency spans, and come with different side-effects.

About filters we learnt that:

• Fast filters start killing notes very few KHz higher in frequency from the filter’s inception frequency.
• Slow filters oppositely let notes of much higher frequencies vs their inception frequency pass through.
• Linear filters (be they fast or slow) add some note imperfection called ringing both before and after the notes
• Minimum phase filters (be they fast or slow) add stronger ringing after the notes, but none before them.

Finally, we noted that the human auditory system has some modest physiological post-ringing, but no pre-ringing.

So in summary: filters do kill unwanted ultrasonic frequencies but they introduce some issues while doing that, so there’s a tradeoff to be found between how strict is the filter and how much of we can afford bear, or even we appreciate, filter’s drawbacks.

To make an example of such tradeoff let’s go back to the graph we originally used to learn how these filters macroscopically work. Here it is, do you remember it?

The specific case is an ordinary CD-quality 44.1KHz digital track.

Which will be the pros and cons of those 3 filters ? Try yourself !

Size Sampling frequency matters

It’s not entirely accurate to take 20KHz as the top frequency that matters to our purpose of an optimal music reproduction.

While it is in facts true that no human hear can perceive sounds higher than 20Khz frequency (and only being young, too!), it is also true that music is not made of sounds only, but also of timing.

Information about silences (their length), echoes (their timings) etc, can involve frequencies much beyond 20Khz. Sileces, echoes etc are what adds spatial accents to the sound.

Of course not all digital tracks will be sophisticated enough to even contain such high(er) frequency space-related information in the first place. A bad recording is a bad recording, and do we want to talk about bad mastering? Sheesh.

Also, it does take a not too ordinary DAC to appropriately make use of such >20KHz (see my article about Apogee Groove for an example, and some hint on the reasons for this).

When talking in general terms as we are doing today, however, we must appreciate that frequencies above 20Khz are not easily expendable as one may think at first.

Which of course makes our filters story even more dramatic. If you read back the conclusions of the previous chapter – those commenting on the pros and cons of the Green / Red / Purple filters we used for training – this is the reason why I underlined that all three filters would harm soundstage a bit.

Now on to some good news, for a change.

Suppose we have our digital tracks sampled at sample rate much higher than ordinary CD-quality. Let’s say they are at 96Khz.

The DAC will start producing its ultrasonic artifacts starting from (remember?) one half of that, so in this case artifacts will not have frequencies lower than 96/2 = 48Khz.

That’s a lot above our human hearing upper limit, and also up quite enough to let most if not all those high(er) frequency samples partaking to spatial cues that we mentioned just before.

Connecting more dots

If we can count on digital tracks sampled at rates much higher than 44.1KHz, then the situation changes when it comes to the pros and cons of fast and slow filters.

Let’s recycle our training case: the green / red / purple filters. Let’s assume the track is sampled at 96Khz instead of 44.1KHz this time. Artefacts will start to appear from 48KHz on up.

The Green filter would in this case drop dead at 48KHz, killing all artefacts. Perfect like before. It would start from 4Khz lower, so from 44KHz. Unlike the previous case, this would not harm treble air, nor likely spatial-related frequencies at all. Perfect (thanks to the higher incoming sampling rate!). As a fast, minimum phase filter there would be some just modest post ringing. Good!

The Red filter would drop dead at 50KHz so it would let 2KHz open for Ultrasonic images. Not totally welcome yet surely unaudible. Fold-back images would be there, but too far off from audibility threshold for some to pass it. Nice-ish. Inception would be at 45KHz so still zero harm to treble tones nor to treble air, and hardly any chance of chopping on soundstange. Good. Still a fast linear filter so its pre-ringing smoothing notes down would be there. So-so (tastes dependent).

The Purple filter would drop dead at 54KHz so even more (unaudible but potentially harmful) ultrasonic artefacts and little to none of their IMDs would reach down enough to fold-back into audibility. Not so good. Inception at 44KHz so again zero harm to treble notes, treble air and likely to soundstage too. Good. It’s a linear filter so smoothing notes down due to pre-ringing. So-so (tastes dependent).

Choices

So in the end which reconstruction filter would I choose – if given the option of course ?

Like in many other aspects of audio (and of life)… it depends.

First and foremost, it depends on the the digital music’s sample rate. Sarting from higher up, fold-back images generated by the slow filter will hardly if ever fall into audible range. Which makes a slow filter’s main benefit – its significantly more modest ringing – a much more “affordable” option of course.

This is so much true that whenever at all possible and doable at a decent technical level, up sampling lower rate (44.1/48KHz) tracks onto at least twice the rate is a no brainer to me!

Another discriminating element to consider is one’s preference in terms of note transients. I do tend to prefer short transients, cleaner timbres. Therefore I sharply lean towards minimum phase filters, which unlike linear filters are immune from pre-ringing.

When my tracks are desperately 44.1KHz, and my transport does not give me a [viable] up sampling option, then I’m kinda forced to opt for a fast filter of course. Which will generate much stronger ringing compared to the slow alternative, and will make minimum phase even more desireable vs linear!

Lastly, all of the above is to be taken “in principle”, and not necessarily “in practice”, as the path going from principles to practice passes through actuality, in our case it pass through the particular DAC devices we actually have available. Our DAC may not offer a choice of different filters. Or, may offer only a very restricted choice. Or even may offer various filters of which some well implemented and others badly implemented.

Very long story short: the above is how it should work. How it does work can only be told by our ears – with good peace of all die-hard objectivists.

The post Reconstruction Filters For Dummies appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Had a great first day at the High-End Munich 2022. Met up with a lot of people, especially Vitalie Sandu of SoundNews.net. Couldn’t meet Resolve and Cameron because it was almost afternoon by the time I got there and I had to talk with some people quickly.

Tried the Kann Alpha Max, proper upgrade over OG Kann Alpha. The OS is still sluggish but the mids on these are noticeably more organic. Has the same bass punch and crystalline treble as the original so I think this is a good upgrade.

Then met the awesome people at Final Audio, and tried their latest TWS which I forgot the model number of (will take note tomorrow). They also had Stax SR-X9000 which is a phenomenal headphone. The driver is a thing of beauty, just check the picture.

Spirit Torino from Italy had the Mistral which sounds “grand” for a wireless headphone. Will check it out even further tomorrow. On the DAC side, DCS Bartok Rossini is a good one that I tried today but yeah well it didn’t sound like something exorbitantly exceptional. Need a closer listen tomorrow (today I listened the Meze Elite and DCA Ether 2 on them).

Spirit Torino also had the craziest headphones I’ve seen till now: Spirit Torino Valkyria. Costs $12K, made to order, Titanium housings, weighs like 800gms or so, and of course the cable is fixed. There are also some ruby-like materials inside and a carbon-fiber driver housing because why not.

As for the sound: these slam like a freight-train. One of the most energetic headphones I’ve heard, even though there was no sibilance or harshness upon initial listen. Also they have a very “grand” sense of stage height, though stage depth and width didn’t seem as impressive as the Stax X9000 or the good ol’ HD800S.

Also tried Campfire Audio’s new flagship, the triple-dynamic one. It has very good bass and an energetic signature. Gotta listen again tomorrow to form longer impressions. Mr. Ken Ball was also very welcoming and we had a good chat about the pricing of this, which is more about the exclusivity than sheer performance over the Solaris 2020.

Met with the legend Mr. Axel Grell himself (he came up with the legendary Sennheiser HD-series models as well as the Sennheiser HE-1). 

Had a really nice discussion with him regarding his tuning philosophy and how he looks at the recent trend of “target-hitting” headphones and earphones. Needless to say, he’s one of the coolest guys around.

Also had the chance to try out the Heavys headphones, that are marketed towards metal-heads. I have pre-ordered one already so couldn’t help trying the current prototype out. In terms of sound, the tuning is nearly finalized. I offered some feedback regarding certain design decisions as they wanted to hear my thoughts. Let’s see how the final unit turns out.

As for the sound of the Heavys, they were quite coherent for multi-driver headphones. Upper-mids are not drowned out at all, distortion guitars are put forward. Vocals also come through well. Cymbals are present without being sharp or spiky. Decent separation in fast section, with double pedals being separated from snare hits.

Surprise of the High-End Munich show for me was the Meze 109 Pro (I think that’s the model number). They are still in prototype stage but if the final thing sounds even slightly better than this one, well, we got a potential winner.

I asked the Meze Audio reps about some technical details and they’ve shared some information. So far, it’s using a 50mm bio-cellulose dynamic driver. The driver housing is also encased in a Beryllium-plated metal that probably does something, did not get into those details since I was running short of time.

As for the sound, it’s got really nice bass with rich texturing and excellent layering. The mids were warm and smooth but didn’t lack detail. Staging was impressive with surprisingly good depth and height.

Couldn’t test these further but knowing that the pricing will be under $1000, I am really excited to try them out once they hit the market. Planned release: Q3 2022. Looking forward to these.

The Stax SR-X9000 are stupendously good. One of the best headphones out there, without a doubt. They have incredibly lifelike stage depth that rivals that of Susvara. In terms of bass and raw resolution, I think they are better than the Susvara, with the SR-X9000 having a bit more snap in the treble. Susvara still has that romantic smoothness, but the Stax are just as good, in a different way.

I also met up with iFi Audio reps, courtesy of WODAudio where Werner was very welcoming and we had a great discussion about headphones and gear in general. I listened to the new iFi Pro iDSD and Pro iCAN stack, paired with the ZMF Atrium. Needless to say, this was an excellent setup and I look forward to reviewing the iFi Pro stack in the near future.

High End Munich 2022 – Photographic Impressions

The post HIGH END Munich 2022 Audio Show Impressions appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Below are the top 20 articles listed by number of views.

But, hold it, this ranking is statistically unsound as an article published in January had more time to accumulate views than one released in December. The statistics are further skewed by some manufacturers linking back to our articles.

The real measure would be the average read time of an article per visitor….which we don’t know.

Another complicating factor is the crowding starting at #8. From there on, the hits per article as so close together that they make the chart deceptive. One would have to go down to #50 to do justice.

But some observations may be allowed: First, some of the articles on this list were published before 2021, as early as 2019. Second, not all articles are reviews. Third, some ancient ChiFi is here to stay, but the big days of budget ChiFi iems are over (on this blog). Fifth, long retired Slater still has a couple of evergreens. Sixth, only one product on the below list made it onto our Wall of Excellence, and only another one onto our Gear of the Year list.

Last but not least, we started a transition last March to incorporate higher-quality gear…which naturally attracts less interest than hyped budget iems.

Enjoy the list below!

Until next time…keep on listening!

1. Tweaking Tips – A Simplified Guide To IEM Silicone Eartips

2. Apple Audio Adapter Review – The One To Beat

3. KZ ZSN Pro X

4. Conexant CX Pro

5. ifi Audio iPower & iPower X

6. Shanling UA2

7. Hidizs S9 Pro

8. KZ EDX

9. Moondrop Aria (1)

10. Sennheiser IE 300/IE 400 Photography

11. SMSL SU-9 DAC/Preamp

12. Moondrop Aria (2)

13. Tempotec Sonata HD Pro

14. HZSound Heart Mirror (2)

15. Tanchjim Tanya (1)

16. ifi Audio Zen Phono RIAA Preamplifier

17. Reversing Starlines

18. Sennheiser Comparison

19. Spinfit Eartips Roundup: A Comprehensive Comparison Between 8 Variants

20. KZ ZSN Pro

Contact us!

Gear Of The Year 2021 – Our Personal Favourites

The post Our Top 20 List of Blog Articles of 2021…By Numbers Only appeared first on Music For The Masses.

We have no commercial interests. Our goal is to inform our readership while being learner drivers. We strive to deliver quality. We are not interested in freebies but in accessing interesting gear – and in reporting about it. Your stuff will be returned as long as you cover cost. And we have borrowed a lot, also from private sources, to build the portfolios we are proud of.

We started almost exclusively with iems (currently about 300) but later branched out into essentially everything portable audio, including desktop devices.

But we never intended to earn money through our reviews – it has always been a labour of love – and we will keep it like that.

One thing that always put a bad taste in our mouths is affiliate links: having an incentive to write favourable reviews is an absolute no for each one of us. I’d rather chew my hand off before succumbing to such blatant conflict of interest. Sorry, can’t do it.

Nevertheless, some companies insisted on such – simply to track their sales. In these rare cases, we donated the complete revenue to a Chicago charity supporting stage musicians through covid 19.

I am personally of the opinion we should drop these links altogether. After all, we are no salespeople, be it with commission or without. We see ourselves as consumer advocates, audio aficionados, and…geeks.

And since we are not guided by generating income, we can focus on less popular (but important) products such as power supplies or USB decrappifiers.

However, the blog has a basic operating cost (web hosting, domain name…). And we may need a better web template to improve our appearance. So far, I have been stuck with these expenses. These do not include DHL/UPS/Fedex processing fees, imports taxes, or shipping gear between us for a second review…which affect all of us.

We learn, blogging costs money.

How to offset these costs? Paypal has generated $0 in the last year. Nada. Zilch. I tried Google advertising on their auto setting…absolutely horrible. Google took this site completely hostage – at a meagre return of <$40 (needs to be topped up to $100 to be paid out). Scrap it.

What are the alternatives ? I was thinking of approaching companies we “like” to sponsor us with ads. Companies that, in our collective opinion, produce or sell quality gear. We would put advertising only in the right sidebar or footer but NOT into the main body of text (to sustain the flow of reading), NOT near the top banner, and NOT as aggravating popups of any kind.

Nothing annoying. Nothing into your face. It has to be subtle – and classy. And you, the reader, should be given the opportunity to avoid it altogether.

Any excess money, after hosting and taxes, would go at 100% back into the blog, be it for postage, import fees, or review gear acquisition. None of us will stuff their pockets.

In the end, despite advertising, www.audioreviews.org will remain entirely non profit. And cool as f***!

Let’s see whether I can convince everybody involved.

Until next time…keep on listening!

Contact us!

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Gear of the Year: 2021 marks the blog’s third year and the second with 8 contributors. We collectively published almost 200 articles, mainly product reviews, but also technical information. Apart from receiving review units from manufacturers and sellers, we also purchased a lot…and we borrowed from audiophile friends and colleagues.

We are a heterogeneous bunch not pressed into templates by commercialism. Each of us enjoys maximum freedom. None of us gets paid. And it is this variety that makes this blog interesting. Two of us, Baskingshark and Kazi, have been drafted to also write for Headphonesty, which gives them more exposure and also access to very interesting gear.

Our main focus has traditionally been on earphones – we have reviewed almost 300 – but particularly DACs and amps also caught our attention this year.

As at the end of the previous years, we list our our personal favourites of 2021 – the portable audio we personally enjoyed most. There are no rules, we just tell you what we like. After all, the gear we use most is our best. And we attached some of this gear to our newly created Wall of Excellence, which averages all our opinions.

Enjoy this read and we wish you a happy and successful 2023!

We thank

Most of our reviews would have not been possible without our 2021 cooperating partners. We thank:

ADV, Allo, Apos Audio, Astell & Kern, AudioQuest, Azla, Blon, BQEYZ, Burson Audio, Campfire Audio, Cayin, CCA, Dekoni, Dunu, ddHiFi, EarMen, Easy Earphones, Fiil, Helm Audio, Hidizs, HifiGo, ifi Audio, IKKO Audio, KBEAR/TRI Audio, Keephifi, Khadas, Knowledge Zenith, Meze, Moondrop, Musicteck, NiceHCK, OneOdio, Penon Official Store, Pergear, Sennheiser, Shanling, Shenzhenaudio, Smabat, Snake Oil Sound, SpinFit, Tempotec, Tin Hifi, TRN Official Store, Unique Melody, Venture Electronics, Whizzer Official Store, Yaotiger Hifi Audio Store. Don’tkillusifweforgotyoujustsendusanotandwefixit. 

For the companies: you can check for your products/yourself in the search field on the right-hand side.

We also thank the private sources that supplied us with loaners.

And here we go…that’s what we enjoyed in 2021…

Alberto Pittaluga…Bologna, ITALY

I’ve come accross quite a few interesting pieces of gear in 2021, mixed / hidden amongst piles of shameful crap. Nothing new, is it ? I’ll try to make a succint list of the most significant stuff I auditioned here. Most of these devices are also now part of my operative audio gear.

IEMS

Dunu ZEN (discountinued, was $ 699,00) : beyond spectacular microdynamics, resolution, layering and technicalities in general. A masterpiece.

iBasso IT07 ($899) : the sole real “direct upgrade” to Ikko OH10 I encountered as of yet. Same presentation, twice the refinement, at more than four times the price.

Oriolus Isabellae ($ 599) : somewhat “more V-shaped” alternative to Zen, delivering very similar technical prowess.

Ikko OH1S ($143) : a potential new join into the our World of Excellence roster as a sub-200$ allrounder

Headphones

Final Sonorous-II  (€ 300) : arguably by far the best neutral-tuned closebacks in their price category, staging and imaging easily compete with many lower tier openback alternatives.

Sennheiser HD600 (€ 310) : not a novelty for anybody but me, I’m sure. Quite simply: I got my first HD600 pair in 2021 and that’s why I’m listing it here. I presume no one needs a description. Do you?

Earbuds

Rose Mojito ($259) : superbly neutral-tuned high end earbuds with strong bilateral extention, beyond spectacular mids and vivid, refined highs in a fully holographic stage, with plenty of resolution and dynamics.

K’s Earphone Bell-LBS (€ 59,25) : mid centric buds delivering superbly organic vocals – both male and female – and very good trebles

K’s Earphone K300 (€ 28,59) : unreal sub-bass extension for an earbud, they deliver a very nice V shaped presentation while drawing an incredibly sizeable 3D stage. Presentation remembers a bit Ikko OH10, but in earbud form.

DAC/AMPs

Ifi Micro iDSD Signature (€ 749) : top sub-$1K mobile dac-amp. Very high quality DAC reconstruction paired with superbly transparent amping stage with power to spare for the most demanding planars and power deflation options to optimise low impedance IEM biasing. Truly a full step ahead of the competitors’ pack.

DAPs

Cowon Plenue 2 MK-I (€ 835) : hopped on this recently when I found a impossible to turndown openbox deal. Starting from my direct experience proving that there’s pretty much no game between proprietary-OS DAPs vs commercial-OS (read Android) DAPs, the former being in by far better position to achieve superior output sound quality, Plenue 2 represents a great companion to my QP1R offering a different / alternative optimal pairing opportunity for a few of my preferred IEM drivers.

DAC/AMP Dongles

This year’s experience proved to me that exclusively higher-tier (and price) dongles are able to deliver sound qualities worth the comparison with battery-equipped alternatives. Simply put: pretty much nothing until an Apogee Groove ($200) is really worth the price difference compared to the super-cheap Apple Dongle ($9), and even on the Groove some caveats apply (power needs, amp stage competibility).  That said, I really had pick one device “in the midfield” I’d pick the :

Questyle M12 ($139,99): while still not worth an inclusion on our Wall of Excellence, yet M12 runs circles around pretty much all similar or lower priced competitors I assessed in terms of extension, note weight, clarity and technicalities.

Biodegraded…Vancouver, CANADA

Doesn’t have anything to report this year.

Durwood…Chicago, USA

Shozy Form 1.4 has still been my go to earphone due to it’s warm inviting nature, great technical abilities and it feels great in my ears.

7Hz Timeless is another good buy late in the year for me, it’s a little more sub-bass plus analytical counterpart to the Shozy that has nudged the BQEYZ Spring 2 out of the way. A more detailed review is coming.

I rediscovered the Senfer UES for a quick throw around set, was hoping the Senfer DT9 was a slight improvement, but alas the Senfer UES sticks around instead. Sony MH755 is also perfect for quick on the go usage where I don’t need the universal fit in-ears.

Tempotec impressed me enough to consider the Sonata E35 for when good phone DAP’s are finally dead. Other than that, dongles are not my thing, and I have issues with some of Sony’s GUI decisions on the NW-A55 mainly related to playlist creation and long text support.

Lastly, the Questyle CMA Twelve would be an awesome DAC/amp combo to have, but my needs are more mobile. Perhaps when life slows down, but there are other bucket list items such as the Burson Playmate 2, RebelAmp, the Ruebert Neve RNHP, or RME ADI-2 that look interesting as well. Maybe someone will loan me one in 2022?

Jürgen Kraus…Calgary, CANADA

Earphones have traditionally been our main trade and there’s not many that stuck with me this year. First and foremost, I was impressed by the immersive and engaging sound of the single DD Dunu Zen that further excel in microdynamics. They are still very popular within our team.

Moondrop finally got it right with their tuning in the smooth and very pleasant sounding Moondrop KATO single dynamic driver. This model is generally well received. The JVC HA-FDX1 are still my standard iems for equipment testing, and an honourable mention goes to the Unique Melody 3DT for the clean implementation of 3 (!) dynamic drivers.

Another iem that fascinated me is the Japanese Final E5000. On the market since 2018, and very source demanding, this iem can produce a bass texture beyond belief. I have become a bit of a Final fanboy, as their products are unpretentious and natural sounding…and they fit my ears very well. I also purchased the Final E1000, E3000, and A3000…which get a lot of usage. No surprise that our Wall of Excellence is decorated like a Christmas tree by quite a few of these Japanese earphones and headphones.

Expanding my horizon into other devices, the Sony NW-A55 is a user-friendly digital audio player with great sonic characteristics and signature-altering 3rd party firmware options. But, most of all, it updates its music library within a minute or two. For the ultimate portable enjoyment, I discovered the Questyle QP1R dap...sounds simply amazing with the Final E5000. Found the dap on Canuck Audio Mart.

Dongles, battery-less headphone DAC/amps that turn any cheap phone into a decent music player, were big in 2021. Around since 2016, the market caught on to these devices. But out of the mass of dongles tested, the 2019 AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt was the most musical to my ears. I also like the AudioQuest DragonFly Red and the EarMen Eagle (replacing the EarMen Sparrow which I sent to Biodegraded). For earphone testing (and bigger cans), I still use the excellent Earstudio HUD100.

For my full-sized headphone needs with my notebook, I discovered the powerful Apogee Groove, a current-hungry dongle DAC/amp that has been around since 2015. I am even portable around the house. As to headphones themselves, I am still happy with the Sennheiser HD 600 and HD 25, but also with the Koss Porta Pro.

For my desktop setup, I identified the EarMen Tradutto as being a fantastic DAC in combination with the Burson Funk amp. Currently testing the Tradutto with my big stereo system.

In summary, I learnt a lot in 2021…

My Take Home this Year

• The latest is barely the greatest…many old brooms get better into the corners
• Influencers are not always right (…to say it nicely)
• Measurements are overrated
• Timbre (degree of naturalness of sound) is underrated
• Source is super important and also underrated
• Group pressure through hype may become a sobering experience
• That groomed YouTube stuff is boring

Kazi Mahbub Mutakabbir…Munich, GERMANY

This year was very educational for me when it came to audiophilia. I got the chance to try out truly summit-fi setups and realized how good a system can sound. This also resulted in a sense of yearning where you keep comparing the gears you own with the ones you cannot own, at least not yet. Nonetheless, without further ado.

Headphones: The one headphone that has stuck with me throughout the year is the Hifiman Susvara. They won’t flatter anyone with the build quality but when paired with the right amp they sound astonishing. One of the most natural sounding headphones out there with exceptional timbre. A must listen.

Honorable mention goes to the Final D8000. Supreme bass that’s pretty much unmatched. On the budget side, I really liked the Final Sonorous-III. They are underrated and under-appreciated.

IEMs: When it comes to in-ear monitors, I have a hard time picking any single one of them as all of them fall short in one area or another. Nonetheless, the one IEM I’ve used the most throughout the year is the Dunu Zen. There is something truly addicting about their sound that makes me come back to them time and again.

However, the Zen is not the best IEM that I have heard throughout the year. That would probably be the Sony IER-Z1R or the 64Audio U12t. In the relatively budget realm, the 7Hz Timeless took me by surprise with their planar speed and excellent bass slam.

Source: Instead of going with separate sections for amps, DACs and such, I will just consolidate them into one.

Best desktop amp I’ve tried: Accuphase E380. One of those rare speaker amps that sound great with headphones.

Best portable amp I’ve tried: Cayin C9. It is the only review loaner in the past year that I have wanted to buy with my own money. I probably will, soon, budget permitting.

Best DAP: Lotoo PAW 6000, even though it can’t power difficult loads.

Best dongle: L&P W2. The only dongle that I found to be good enough to replace some DAPs.

Best DAC: Holo May L2. The price is extremely high but so is the sound quality. Exceptionally natural and neutral tuning. Another must listen.

And that’s a wrap. Have a great Christmas, and see you on the other side!

KopiOkaya…SINGAPORE

Too many lists…I focus on eartips…

Best EARTIPS of 2021

Most versatile eartips: SpinFit CP-100+
Best budget eartips: Audiosense S400
Best eartips for bass: FAudio “Instrument” Premium Silicone Earphone Tips
Best eartips for vocal: Azla SednaEarFit Crystal (Standard)
Best eartips for treble: BGVP S01
Best eartips for soundstage: Whizzer Easytips SS20
Most comfortable eartips: EarrBond New Hybrid Design

Loomis Johnson…Chicago, USA

Gear of the Year (and other Favorite Things)

SMSL SU-9 DAC/Preamp—one of those pieces that makes you seriously question why anyone would spend more. A seriously good DAC which is even better as digital preamp.

Hidisz S3 Pro DAC/Dongle—lacks the juice to power challenging loads, but has an uncanny knack for enlivening and improving more efficient phones. Very refined, with impeccable bass control.

Cambridge Melomania TWS—ancient by TWS standards, and its rivals have more features and tech, but this may still be the best-sounding TWS you can buy.

Shozy Rouge IEM—like a really hot girl you get smitten by the beauty before you even delve into the substance. Properly driven, however, these sound just as good as they look, with estimable staging and clarity.

The Beatles, “Get Back” Documentary—as probably the only person on earth who hasn’t seen Lord of the Rings I was gobsmacked by how brilliant this film looked and sounded. The real surprise for me, however, was how natural  a musician John was—unburdened by technique, but soulful and  exploratory.  Poor George invokes your pity—a good writer forced to compete with two great ones– while Ringo wins the award for Best Attitude.

Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”—I always found the lyrics impenetrable and a bit sophomoric, but the Spanish-influenced lead guitar part is incredible, with scarcely a phrase repeated throughout the full 11 minutes. I’d always assumed it was Mike Bloomfield, but it’s actually the harmonica virtuoso Charlie McCoy, who also plays the trumpet part of “Rainy Day Women”.

Reds, Pinks and Purples, “Uncommon Weather” In hope of finding something genuinely fresh I dutifully listened to the most-touted 2021 releases before fixating on this one, which (predictably) sounds exactly like 80s Flying Nun and Sarah bands.

And This Was The Previous Year:

The post Gear Of The Year 2021 – Our Personal Favourites appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Introduction

The Apogee Groove is a very good sounding “dongle” DAC/amp that replaces a desktop stack for many. It draws its current from the source device and has a rather high output impedance of 20 ohm (the competition is typically < 1 ohm), which makes it problematic for use with low-impedance iems. The manufacturer does not recommend using it with multidriver iems either.

Whilst the laws of physics appear to limit the Apogee Groove’s use, there are some welcome exceptions to the rule(s)…which will be discussed in the following.

General Considerations

The 1/8 Rule

If you multiply the output impedance of your source by eight, that’s the lowest impedance headphones you should use with that source. For example, the Apogee Groove with its 20 ohm output impedance should be paired with  >160 ohm headphones.

What if the Output Impedance violates the 1/8 Rule? 

There will be variations in the headphone’s frequency response. With some headphones, especially balanced armature or multi driver designs, these variations can be rather extreme. Typical is bloated, boomy bass as the headphone does not get enough power.

Why are BA Drivers problematic (Multis and even single BAs)? 

With some headphones, especially balanced armature or multidriver designs, these variations can be rather extreme. Example: these headphones usually have a rated impedance between 16 and 32 ohm but their actual impedance typically varies greatly with frequency. The 21 ohm Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5, for example, ranges from 10 ohms to 90 ohms. These wide variations frequently interact in unfavourable ways with the output Impedance of the source. 

What about single DD Drivers? 

The impedance variations across the frequency spectrum are not as severe as with BAs…or there is no variation at all.

Apogee Groove only

What is different for the Apogee Groove with single DDs?

The 1/8 rule can be disregarded for single DDs with the Apogee Groove, thanks to Apogee’s special “Constant Current Drive” tech, and not even “in every single pair case”.  The CCD technology compensates for impedance mismatches between source and headphones. Without CCD tech all sub 100 ohm drivers you’d connect would have a very noticeable mid bass bump. Apogee Groove won’t alter FR when driving low impedance loads, or higher impedance ones featuring wild impedance swings.

What is different for the Apogee Groove with BAs and Multidrivers?

We would expect the Groove’s high output impedance to alter the BA’s/multidrivers’ frequency responses.

Apogee themselves advise against the use of multidriver BAs and crossover networks as their “Constant Current Drive” technology may result in uneven frequency response when used with certain models.”

Their impedance mismatch compensation does not work with many multidriver BAs. But why? 

There may be a conflict between crossover filters (using capacitors) and CCD. The technology may work with non-capacitive filters …or some other trick. 

I speculate the the Groove has a better chance of compensating for impedance variations in BAs, if these are not extravagant. Would be interesting to compare the impedance profiles of such BAs that work and some that don’t.

BUT: unless you compare frequency responses measured using Apogee Groove against a low-impedance amp, you don’t know wether your frequency response was skewed, as the deviations may not be that audibly obvious in some cases…considering our generally poor auditory memory and our expectation bias.

Hope this all makes sense to you.

Until next time…keep on listening!

Sources used

Discussion with Alberto and Kazi. Photos by Kazi.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/headphone-impedance-explained.html

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.html

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The post The 1/8 Rule And The Apogee Groove – A Tech Discussion appeared first on Music For The Masses.

It has been long overdue. After all, 8 contributors have a lot to say. We there our own DAILY NEWS page. It serves the purpose of informing you with internals at audioreviews.org, but also of reporting interesting industry developments and trends. It may also feature the odd opinion piece, and our FIRST IMPRESSIONS of a product.

You find a link to the NEWS page in the toolbar above.

Until next time…keep on listening!

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